MacBreak Weekly 875, Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

Leo Laporte (00:00:00):
It's time for Mac Break Weekly. Andy Ihnatko, Alex, Lindsay and I are very pleased to welcome James Thompson filling in for Jason Snell this week. You know, James is the author of Peak Calc. He's gonna give us the developer's eye view on everything Apple announced at ww c m Break. Weekly is next

(00:00:18):
Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is TWiT. This is MacBreak Weekly episode 875, recorded Tuesday, June 20th, 2023. Nobody needs Antarctica. This episode of MacBreak Weekly is brought to you by AG 1 by Athletic Greens. If you're looking for a simpler and cost effective supplement routine, ag one is giving you a free one-year supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your first purchase of a subscription. Go to athletic greens.com/mac break and by Melissa more than 10,000 clients worldwide. Rely on Melissa for full spectrum data quality and ID verification software. Make sure your customer contact data is up to date. Get started today with 1000 records cleaned for free at melissa.com/twit. And buy Zoc Doc. When you're not feeling your best and just trying to hold it together, finding great care should not take up all your energy. Go to zoc doc.com/mac break and download the Zoc Doc app for free. Then find and book a top rated doctor today. Many are available within 24 hours. It's time for Mac Break Weekly, the show we cover the latest Apple News. I'm gonna introduce our special guest in a moment, but first, let's say hello to Alex Lindsay from Office Hours and 0 9 0 Media. Hello, Alex, the man with the best shot in the world. The most beautiful. Your background is getting richer and more beautiful all the time. <Laugh>, it's

Alex Lindsay (00:01:59):
Mostly just junk back there. The the best thing is, you know, short depth of field. So you can't see that I'm just throwing junk on the field. Fuzzy. That's like, I got this stuff and that's the key. It's back there. Yeah, exactly.

Leo Laporte (00:02:08):
Blurry junk or Yeah, exactly. Do what Andy Ihnatko does. Just get a show G screen, no one will know.

Andy Ihnatko (00:02:14):
There you go. Hi Andy again. Who's, how, how messy is my office back there? No one, I'm not saying <laugh>. You're not gonna find out from there. What I like, what I like about Alex is, is that it it it, you're getting the vibe of like a late 1980s, early 1990s cable news channel sort of thing where this just, oh, look how busy our, we got so many busy things in our newsroom. It's, it's dimly lit, but we've got, you can see by the number of screens that we're not doing this on the cheap. We've hired lots of people. Really, honestly, it's, it's mostly we're watching lots of television to get you lit.

Leo Laporte (00:02:46):
And an intern wanders through then says, Ooh, I'm on camera and ducks out.

Alex Lindsay (00:02:49):
It's, it's mostly full of things that used to be worth a lot of money. Like, like

Leo Laporte (00:02:52):
They're all That's exactly what, yeah, they

Alex Lindsay (00:02:54):
All do it. It's the wall of depreciation. Yes. You know, so

Leo Laporte (00:02:57):
Yeah. Things that used to the wall of depreciation,

Andy Ihnatko (00:03:01):
Look upon my works and despair says this $10,000 workstation. I mean

Alex Lindsay (00:03:04):
This camera, this camera right here was quarter million dollars.

Leo Laporte (00:03:07):
Oh

Alex Lindsay (00:03:08):
God. This camera right here was $60,000. And they're all worth like

Leo Laporte (00:03:11):
Hundreds now <laugh>, you're the odd manias of PCs. Yeah, exactly. Now let's say hello, Jason Snell's got the week off cuz as he mentioned last week, we're so proud of him and his daughter's graduating from college and he's there up there doing that. But we took this as an opportunity to gr the great James Thompson on for a pcalc fame. Hi James.

James Thomson (00:03:34):
Hi. I'm always pleased to shift the average age down a bit for this show,

Leo Laporte (00:03:39):
So it's a lot. <Laugh>, you're gray too, dude. Don't don't be blowing any horns outta my James is legendary. As when did you first start developing for was it Mac that you started with or iOS that you started? Yeah,

James Thomson (00:03:54):
I started the Mac the first peak out shipped in December 92. So it's well over 30 years old at this point. So that, that should give you a baseline for how old I am. Yeah, yeah. I'm only actually, I'm only two years younger than Jason, so Yeah, you go, can't, can't actually throw many. So

Leo Laporte (00:04:11):
You did shift it down though. That's good. That's good. Yeah.

James Thomson (00:04:14):
Yeah. I mean, mathematically yes. <Laugh>, you know,

Leo Laporte (00:04:17):
Realistically no, spiritually, emotionally.

Andy Ihnatko (00:04:18):
No, no, you got, you got, you, got, you, got, you gotta leverage that. Like my, like I have, like, I have older sisters and like, I'm only like two years younger than like the next youngest one, but according to like Time Magazine or whatever, she's technically a baby boomer and I'm technically Generation X, so I'm Oh, you boomers you just, I I I can't be fixing your phone all the time. Okay. I can't keep explaining to you how America Online works.

Leo Laporte (00:04:44):
Switch. I have to ask James, if you breath caught as many of us did during Apple's event a couple of weeks ago when they said, and finally we're releasing an app we should have released long ago for the iPad. And everybody

James Thomson (00:04:57):
Literally, I, I genuinely, I, I held my breath for the like, couple of seconds. I mean, like, I, I, I'd actually, I think I, I posted to Mastodon earlier in the day. I said like, I will be genuinely surprised if they don't release a calculator these days because it's such low hanging fruit and they get such thick for it. But no, they didn't. So it was

Leo Laporte (00:05:21):
Health and, and, but we were all thinking calculator. We thought,

James Thomson (00:05:26):
Yeah, I mean, James's

Leo Laporte (00:05:27):
Gonna get Sherlock, but you wouldn't get Sherlock cuz yours is so much superior than anything Apple would do. Well,

James Thomson (00:05:31):
I mean, I think the thing is like the platforms that we sell the most on is phone and Mac. Yeah. Where there's a calculator already, so it doesn't actually matter. Yeah. You know, they, they shipped a calculator on the watch even. You know, I was actually, I had a bet with somebody that they would ship a calculator on the headset before they shipped it on the iPad. But it seems like they're not doing

Leo Laporte (00:05:54):
That Vision Pro calculator. You just look at a number and and it adds it in. I

James Thomson (00:06:01):
And when you wanna be surrounded by your numbers,

Leo Laporte (00:06:03):
Really, that's it. 3D numbers. Well anyway, we're glad you didn't get Sherlock and I think that's actually, I'm gonna interpret it as little tip of the hat to you that we don't need to do a calculator on the iPad because there is the best calculator ever, already

James Thomson (00:06:19):
There. I think that most of Apple product marketing has no idea who I am. <Laugh>. And the people who do know who I am don't think of me fondly. Oh

Leo Laporte (00:06:28):
No, that's not at Apple, you mean. Well, I know that feeling good. Lord. I still,

James Thomson (00:06:33):
I mean, like, I, I was, once, I once talked to Craig Federici at ww d c and I was sort of giving him the, the background on myself and, and I started to say who I was and tell some anecdote and he looked at me and he said, I've heard you tell that story on a podcast. And I thought, oh wow. The only podcast that I have told that on was debug where I said a lot of fairly negative things about my time at Apple. So oh dear. Oh

Leo Laporte (00:07:01):
Dear. That was a very interesting backhanded way of saying I know you.

James Thomson (00:07:08):
Yeah, I mean I have like, if we get onto talking about widgets that was certainly something that I was known for Yeah. Nine years ago as said.

Leo Laporte (00:07:19):
Time. Good. We will talk about widgets, we'll talk about everything cuz I, I wanted to bring, I said to John as Ashley a producer. It would be great to get a developer on and get their take on everything that happened at wwdc. You're the perfect person for it. I guess I should ask you first what you think of the Vision Pro? I mean, are you gonna do peak calc for the Vision Pro?

James Thomson (00:07:40):
I mean, yes. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:07:42):
You'll do Dice for sure cuz Dice actually makes sense.

James Thomson (00:07:45):
Like, so I've, I was playing, as many people know, the peak how be screen kind of went a bit berserk and Oh yeah, this 3D game and all that sort of stuff and all that was, I started it because I wanted to learn about 3D graphics because there were rumors like six right. Years ago, seven years ago about the headset. So I wanted to have an idea about 3D graphics. And so yeah, I mean, like, as it stands, if I do nothing, the, the app will still run on the Vision Pro because it will run iPad apps. But it seems like there isn't actually like to get it running as a Native Vision Pro app. There's not much work I need to do. I actually did most of the work last year. The, and I think with, with Peak a, you know, the thing that I think about when they showed it off was like one of the first apps they showed off was Microsoft Office, which is like the least kind of whizzbang 3D thing that they could have led with. And I think what they were saying there is like any app that you would want on your computer or your iPad or your phone or whatever is the kind of app you wanna have on this device. And so, yeah, I mean, I'll do PCAL for it, but as you say, dice I haven't even got an AR mode in that already and I haven't tried it, but maybe that actually even does something already on the Vision Pro when you launch it in AR mode.

Leo Laporte (00:09:18):
How close was your guess since you developed this before it came out as to what the API, the SDK would look like? Did you is

James Thomson (00:09:28):
I, I'm actually, I was, my guess was that they were going to cut off all the old technologies and they were gonna say no UI kit, things like that. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and they were gonna say Swift UI only for the whole thing. And they didn't actually do that. What they said was, you can use UI kit, but we will judge you for doing so. And you know, some things might not work quite as well, but the stuff is there and it will work. The o the only a p I that didn't really make the cut was sync it, which is actually what I used for the 3D stuff initially with peacocks about and with dice that, that can't display 3D content. Like it can display it flat in a window, but that doesn't work. So the, there's it, they actually brought across more than I thought they would, and I'm sure they will cut that off pretty soon. But, but it means like, because if you're getting iPad apps existing once over, they needed to have most of that stuff there anyway in terms of UI kit and things. So yeah, I mean I, I was pleasantly surprised by that. I was quite surprised by the price the

Leo Laporte (00:10:40):
Higher than you thought or lower. I'm gonna guess higher, but

James Thomson (00:10:43):
I I, yeah, higher because when people were, when there was the rumors saying, oh, it's gonna be $3,000 that were floating around beforehand, and everybody was saying, yeah, this is just gonna be like the iPad again where Right. You know, we, we all think it's gonna be $3,000, but then they come out, they say it's $2,000 and we go, wow, that's so cheap. Wouldn't be cheap. And so when they said three and a half, I audibly swore I will not look at what I said <laugh>. I, I mean, I understand it, you know, I, I totally understand. This is not a device that anyone is actually really intended to buy, you know, this is, well,

Leo Laporte (00:11:25):
You are, this is the, I should point

James Thomson (00:11:26):
It out. Oh yeah, I am. Yeah, I will.

Leo Laporte (00:11:28):
And I suppose we are <laugh>.

James Thomson (00:11:31):
Yeah, I think it, it's, it's like it's the first, it's the first device, you know, it, it's to to so that people like me can make stuff. Right. People like you can write about it and experience it. Right. And, you know, some rich tech bros pulled by it as well. And you know, we,

Leo Laporte (00:11:50):
We'll, and there's your hundred thousand quarter right there, a hundred thousand years and we'll

James Thomson (00:11:54):
See how it goes because, you know, like five years from now, 10 years from now that I think is the product that people will be buying. I don't think this is like, like the iPad where, you know, they wanna get this into as many hands as possible. And so it's price a quarterly this is like, we are gonna build the absolute best thing with no compromises whatsoever to show what can be done. And then we'll get down to actually selling it to regular human beings at some point in the future. But I, so another thing that I should say, not wishing to monopolize the conversation. I, I'm having problems with my eyes and I have done for the last year basically chronic dry eye stuff. So I find it difficult to look at screens for a long time. I have no idea whatsoever if strapping one of these things to my face is gonna be better or worse than looking at an old screen. My guess is it's gonna be much worse. So I come to this with the unusual, like, I want to develop apps for this. I have no idea if I'll be able to use it. So,

Leo Laporte (00:13:04):
Interesting. Yeah.

James Thomson (00:13:05):
Yeah. That, that is a kind of, you know, if this is the future of computing, truly if I can't use it, then well, I guess I retire. Yeah. but we'll see. Also, I have no idea how this thing works in terms of glasses. Like what specifically, where is the focal point o of this thing when you're looking through it? Because I haven't heard a specific answer to that. Cuz like all the, like ocular, I've got many VR headsets, too many. My Wi Wife may say I've got like the, the Quest and PlayStation VR two, all these things. And most of them, the focal point for that is kind of like two meters plus away. So it's, if you need glasses for distance, then you need that as your prescription to look at the thing. But even if you're looking at something up close in the headset, it's still got the focal point of far away because these things won't shift focus as you change your, as you look at things. So I need glasses for computer screens, which are, you know, like up to a meter away. And I don't need glasses for stuff that's two plus meters away. So I don't know if I'm gonna need to get glasses for it, how, how it's gonna work. So there's a lot, a lot of unanswered questions, but I really wanna try it. Right. but I, I was not flown out by Tim Cook to try my dice app on it. Sadly.

Leo Laporte (00:14:41):
I should have started by asking you how the burnout's going, because I have to say, when you posted that blog post it's almost two years ago now, I, I was like, oh my god, James, we had no idea. Yeah.

James Thomson (00:14:53):
I mean, like, I think I sort of passed through the burnout and I got to a place, particularly when my eyes were, were giving me the most trouble. And I was like, I, I'm, I've reached a more zen position of like, I'm gonna do, I'm gonna do what entertains me and makes me happy. And I'm not going to sort of like push myself madly to good. I mean, like, I say this and I said this the last couple of years, like, I'm not gonna push myself to have everything ready on day one and to ship with this device on day one or to do this on day one. I have done it every single time, but, you know, I'm at least starting to

Leo Laporte (00:15:40):
Think maybe you're famous for that, actually, like we say.

James Thomson (00:15:43):
I

Leo Laporte (00:15:43):
Know. That's the thing. Well, let's see if James has it when it, when it ships and always you do. And, and yeah.

James Thomson (00:15:49):
I mean the thing with peak calc specifically is the, the core code of Peak Cal. Like the, the actual brain of it is super portable of course. And it's very small. It's just mass. Yeah. So I can, I can stuff that anywhere and all it needs is like button presses in and text out. So that is very easy to, to put in places. So when it, when it's something like, you know, if we come, we talk about widgets or even this thing, it's not it's not super hard to put stuff on and to have something there, but yeah, it, it, it would be, you know, if you see me working way too hard to get something out for day one for this headset, you can tell me to slow down.

Leo Laporte (00:16:37):
Okay, good. I hope you will tell yourself to slow down and your family will also Yeah. Tell you Slow down James. It's not, it's okay. I will tell you this right now. If you don't get it out the day iOS 17 ships, we'll be okay with that. It's fine, <laugh>.

James Thomson (00:16:52):
I know, I know people will, but it's, it's just that self-imposed.

Leo Laporte (00:16:56):
Yeah. That's what it is. Of course. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Speaking of burnout, Mr. Alex, Lindsay, you should probably listen to what James is saying. Alex and, and <laugh>, I don't know. Alex is working every moment of his waking life, which is about 18, 19, 20 hours a day. I think

Alex Lindsay (00:17:14):
You know, I pace myself better now. I just don't travel as much. Yeah. You know, I think that's the big thing is that I I That'll kill you. I was doing the travel was what was really nailing me. And now that I'm pretty resistant to it yeah. I spoke at, I spoke at Infocom last week without actually going <laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:17:32):
Come over. Yeah. You assume now everybody assumes, and I would think, James, you wrote that blog post in the middle of the pandemic. I would think the pandemic actually it might have made it worse cuz you've always been, you know, home bound in a way. Just

James Thomson (00:17:44):
<Laugh>. Yeah. I mean, right. Like, I can't actually leave the house I wanna point at Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:17:47):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, you

James Thomson (00:17:49):
Know, I, I

Leo Laporte (00:17:50):
Have You don't have an office to go to or do you? I don't know.

James Thomson (00:17:53):
No, I mean, like this, this is the spare bedroom in our place. Right. And it, it's we, I've been here 23 years in this very room cranking out code. So he hence why you can see on the shelves behind me, things like original Halo in its box <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:18:13):
I thought I saw that, but then I thought, oh, must be dreaming. That's, that's great. No,

James Thomson (00:18:17):
It's like looking behind me. I can see Halo some Star Wars games, some like That's great. You'll kill Andrew Empires. It's just cuz I haven't cleaned the shelves up that, that's

Leo Laporte (00:18:28):
It. Yeah, well they're pretty tidy looking. They're, they look good. They're not,

James Thomson (00:18:31):
It's not quite as curated as some of the other people, shall we say, on the shelf.

Leo Laporte (00:18:35):
Sometimes people put it in color order. You could do that. Maybe just <laugh>. I think that's a little weird personally. Yeah, actually I think about losing your eyesight as for coder, that's gotta be the worst possible outcome for me, losing my hearing. And as my hearing deteriorates, you know, I realize it's, you know, your life, your, your, your life work is at risk. So that's, I understand. That's scary.

James Thomson (00:18:59):
Yeah. I mean, I, like, I, I'm not losing my sight as such, like at least currently you know, it's just, I, I'm limited in the time that I can look at computer screens and find, so I have to kind of choose that carefully, which might be a good thing. Yeah, no, I mean, I think it is a good thing. And I've actually, one of the things that came out of this is I started to read books again, which is something that I kind of fell off for 20 years and I'm now way back into it. Oh, good. And it is like, I thought my attention span had permanently atrophied to the point that I couldn't sit down and read a book, but apparently can. So, you know, like I, I'm not, I'm okay, you know, I it's, but it, but it is, there were points certainly in the last year where I was, you know, genuinely thinking, you know, I, I got my, my max loaded Max studio, I ordered it and then by the time it arrived I was starting to have like first symptoms of stuff and I was thinking, why did I order this?

(00:19:57):
You know, like 5,000 pound computer <laugh>, I don't even know if it'll be able to use the thing <laugh>, but

Leo Laporte (00:20:03):
It's, and when he says pounds, I just, for our American audience, it's not weight <laugh>.

James Thomson (00:20:08):
No. I mean, those things are pretty heavy, but not that heavy.

Leo Laporte (00:20:14):
I bought I bought the new MacBook Pro and I thought I'd it in for a show and not MacBook Pro MacBook era for show until the 15 inch. And you know, I'm sad because it's unfortunate, but on massed, on Stai, John Paul Sta Mayo said, well, cause I was saying how nice I thought the screen was. And he said, well, how can, how does that compare to the the what do they call 'em, the xdk screens on the MacBook Pro, which my wife has a MacBook M two MacBook Pro Max with 64 gigs of Ram 14 inch. So I put side by side and now I don't like it anymore. I want my, I want, I want the MacBook Pro. I'm like, oh man, it really is crisp and nice and beautiful. So I,

James Thomson (00:20:57):
That is like the one time I got bumped up to first class on a flight and that just ruined air travel for the rest of my life.

Leo Laporte (00:21:06):
Because you had a ma Wait, why? I guess I just can just

James Thomson (00:21:10):
I was, well, I don't know. I was flying on apple's dime at that point.

Leo Laporte (00:21:14):
Ah,

James Thomson (00:21:15):
So you know, maybe there's a flag that says possible Apple v i p. Not really.

Leo Laporte (00:21:21):
Oh, I'll never forget going to a lounge. I think we were flying to England and was it, I don't remember which lounge it was. Maybe the British Airways Lounge and Johnny, ive was gonna be in the lounge and they had roped off an area with a velvet rope and they had, and they had balloons and they had his welcome Sir Johnny. I mean, it was v i p central. It was bizarre. And, and everybody's trying to sneak a peek of, of Sir Johnny in his private lounge.

James Thomson (00:21:54):
You're telling me that you don't get balloons?

Leo Laporte (00:21:57):
No, no, I don't get balloons. I don't get nothing. I'm,

James Thomson (00:21:59):
I'm sad.

Leo Laporte (00:22:00):
I do remember that day cuz I couldn't find my ticket. <Laugh>. I had a, I had a Scott vest on and I had too many pockets. <Laugh>. I was going, where is it? I know it's in here somewhere. I finally did find it. We were, okay.

James Thomson (00:22:13):
So Johnny, ive just saw this quite distressed person in the corner Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:22:16):
Wearing a safari jacket thinking, oh, I don't,

Andy Ihnatko (00:22:19):
And and instantly, instantly texted Steve said, what if we could put boarding passes direct on a handheld device?

James Thomson (00:22:26):
I am. Yes. I'm never doing this

Leo Laporte (00:22:27):
Again. Cause of me. Exactly. <laugh>. Alright. I would like to very much talk about the new operating systems but please, I don't wanna leave Andy and, and Alex out. So please guys, jump in. I'm sure you have questions for James. I know you know James probably better than I do. So I don't wanna make this all on James's poor shoulders.

Andy Ihnatko (00:22:52):
No, not in, not gonna, not gonna put too much of a burden on his shoulders, but this is like, as you say, an opportunity. Yeah. <laugh>, like, they're very, it's, it's, it's rare. It's like, it's like, well we we Jason's not here, so we have Paul McCartney on, but we don't wanna talk all about music or, you know, societal change since

Leo Laporte (00:23:10):
The sixties. Right.

Andy Ihnatko (00:23:12):
Hey, Andy, how, how, how, how you doing on, on that Raspberry Pie project? Like,

Leo Laporte (00:23:16):
Oh,

Andy Ihnatko (00:23:17):
Oh, I wanna, I wanna know about the Rooftop concert. What's, I

James Thomson (00:23:20):
Mean, I, I like the fact that you're comparing me to Paul McCartney <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:23:24):
But

Andy Ihnatko (00:23:25):
You, you are, you are the cute one.

James Thomson (00:23:28):
Well, I'll take you that. I'll take that <laugh>. I, I'll I will say my opinion of Paul McCartney went up enormously after watching all of that get back documentary. Yes. Wasn't

Leo Laporte (00:23:36):
That amazing? Oh yeah.

James Thomson (00:23:38):
And it was like, I was like, oh, he really did have to corral all these people. Yes. And he was doing all this work. Wow. Okay. Yeah. Know. So that, that was one thing about that

Leo Laporte (00:23:46):
Joy John comes in with Yoko. The other thing is, my, my opinion of Yoko went up that she wasn't the, you know, the evil Right. Wife breaking up the Beatles there. She just was sitting there knitting. But really the problem was they were both on heroin. John and Yoko were, were completely zoned out on heroin much. I didn't think

Alex Lindsay (00:24:04):
It was funny that Ringo just seemed to be happy to be there.

Leo Laporte (00:24:06):
Ringo was happy. <Laugh>, I, George was a little knew cranky, and, and Paul was trying to, George, George brought Wrangle 'em all,

Alex Lindsay (00:24:12):
But George is the one, but George is the one that brought the 24 track. He had like, the, the

Leo Laporte (00:24:16):
Was his studio, that 24

Alex Lindsay (00:24:17):
Track Yeah. Recorder. Yeah. That took like a, a electrical engineer to run, you know, like there was this one kid who knew how to run it and he's the only one that how to run it. And it was like this very complex Yeah. <Laugh>. It was a really great documentary. Like you think, like when Peter Jackson did it, you were like, I don't know why he did that. Like, it just, it seemed like a really deep dive. And now you want, I I haven't seen the whole, the the long version, but I'm

Leo Laporte (00:24:42):
Oh, I've watched it all, all many, what is it, 13 hours? Is it worth?

James Thomson (00:24:45):
Yeah. I put it on in the background. Exactly. You're you're just kind of, you're hanging out,

Leo Laporte (00:24:50):
Hanging with the Beatles. Yeah,

James Thomson (00:24:51):
Yeah, yeah. What watching them compose songs in like 30 seconds and yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:24:57):
Those are the moments when Paul sits down and says, well, let me noodle on the piano and let it be comes out. Or, you know, you're trying to figure out how to, what get back is gonna be and just watching them com compose assignments or, or

Andy Ihnatko (00:25:09):
Even like all, all the extra information, just incidental information. I think, was it Paul who said that? Like this, like that people are gonna, people are gonna say that the Beatles broke up because Be <laugh> <laugh> because Yoko sat on an amp. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:25:22):
Yeah. Like, no,

Andy Ihnatko (00:25:22):
No. That's not, that's not

Leo Laporte (00:25:23):
<Laugh>. Yoko was a completely benign presence the entire time. Exactly. She's just reading the Racing news knitting every once in a while. She'd break out now. Oh. But it wasn't, you know, it was welcome. Nobody was minding it. Yeah, yeah. It was very respect. The best part is of course, when they, boy we're really far off field. Now it's your fault when you mention Paul, but the best part is when they put a microphone in the teapot in the lunch yeah. Room. Yeah. And without their knowledge recorded, John and Paul and Paul and Paul's really trying to keep John in the band. And it was, it was really interesting to hear that real, very genuine dynamic when they thought they were off mic and off camera. It's a little, you know, here we are sitting there. Really? They put a microphone in the deep pot. That was rude. But I'm glad they did his, from my historical God. Yeah. Yeah. Thank goodness. Yeah. They, for, for a historical point of view. Anyway. Enough of the Beatles. Yeah,

James Thomson (00:26:18):
I I I will take the I'm Ringo, I think of the form.

Leo Laporte (00:26:21):
Ringo.

James Thomson (00:26:22):
Okay. I'm not gonna take Paul McCartney.

Leo Laporte (00:26:23):
Yeah.

James Thomson (00:26:23):
Ringo's. I'm not that.

Leo Laporte (00:26:25):
If Ringo came on, we'd have the same questions for him. So what overall I did you, how do you consume wwdc? Do you watch a lot of the tracks or, so I'll

James Thomson (00:26:38):
Watch like with the, the, the remote stuff. Like there's no point for a developer like me really to do the travel over for the current kind of format of conference because you're, you're gonna end up spending like $10,000 to sit in Apple Park and watch a video that I could also watch at home. Yes.

Leo Laporte (00:26:57):
That's a good

James Thomson (00:26:58):
Point. Yes. and there is, you know, the, it's more now than it was like, I think a as the years go past, I think they're adding more and more like in-person stuff that is actually, I think, useful. And maybe next year is the time where I would actually go over. But so what I've done for the last couple of years is, you know, I'll sit and I'll watch the Rick keynote and the State of the Union live and sort of previously I would tweet out my unfiltered thoughts and now I just post them to Mastodon. It's much the same. And you know, I, I will then like get the sort of high level view of, of everything and then I'll see what has changed, what I think is gonna impact me. Like, it's always good when you can come out of a keynote and think, I actually don't need to do it.

(00:27:50):
Nothing that is the best feeling in the entire world of like, if I do nothing, everything will still work. And it's, it's cool because in, in that situation, it's like, oh, I could actually spend some time working on features and things for the users rather than just catching up with what Apple wants this year. But I mean the, so you see what the big stuff is and then it's a case of like watch, you know, they, they release a bunch of the sessions day by day. I mean, everything is recorded probably weeks beforehand now. Which I think is good because it gives, you know, some of the people who are presenting who would, if I had to do it, certainly I would freak out standing in front of like a thousand to 5,000 people having to give very technical talk, live with code, which could break at a moment's notice. And that now they can, at least they can have a lot of people on who are doing their things and recording their stuff. Right. And I will sit and I will watch, you know, just what interests me.

Alex Lindsay (00:28:53):
I'm curious as to, I, I've watched probably 20 or 30 other ones from this, this, and usually that's about the range that I watch from wwc. And how

Leo Laporte (00:29:00):
Many are there total? Is that like a third of the total? Oh,

Alex Lindsay (00:29:04):
So many. Yeah. No,

James Thomson (00:29:05):
So this, there's a lot <laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:29:07):
A lot. Okay. 30 a lot. Sounds like a lot to me. Cuz they're each an hour long. That's a lot of hours to put in. Yeah,

James Thomson (00:29:13):
Most of them are, there's a lot of half an hour. Okay. I would say these days. Okay. Because they make them just basically the length they need to Right. Rather than, you know, you have to fill a particular slot in a conference.

Alex Lindsay (00:29:24):
Yeah. I think that it was, I think that there, there's about a hundred of 'em. I think somewhere in that ballpark, like 90 to 110. Typically there're, there's typically six a day. Four, there used to be four rooms that did them. So four rooms that did six a day. And then, and they would have to add, to your point, most of them had to, the target was I think to last like 40 minutes or 45 minutes long. And, and a lot of times it felt like things were getting stretched out cause they don't take q and a. So it wasn't, you weren't, you weren't getting any benefit from it. I I have to say that I I find them much more pleasurable to watch now than they, than when they were alive. The audio is much better. The imagery is much better, which is much easier to watch them, especially at speed. Except in the WWC app, which doesn't have a, I don't know, do you watch them at one X or do you watch them faster than they

James Thomson (00:30:09):
Would? I I watch at one x, if I watched anything at higher speed, my brain would explode. <Laugh>, it's just, i

Alex Lindsay (00:30:15):
I tion mode. So I'm the problem with the, the, the, the, the we their, we their the Apple TV app is that it runs at, it's a 1.5 or two. You can always tell that someone doesn't actually watch things fast when they skip 1.75 because 1.75 is the right number for most things <laugh>. And so, so I'm always like on the t top of of those, but I just find 'em to be, I I felt like it's a huge jump forward as far as Yeah. I'm curious. So you,

James Thomson (00:30:39):
I mean the the other thing that they do in them is that they have the transcripts there immediately, which is very helpful because like I can, before I even watch a session, I can just have a quick scan through the transcript and see if it is talking about the kind of thing that I'm interested in. Sometimes it's not obvious particularly from the title what the level of technical complexity is gonna be. So yeah, I mean I, I like, I mean, I think the developer app's pretty good. I, as I say, I watch all the stuff at at one X anyway. But I, I can't watch all of it because there's so much, and if I do try and watch all of it, I will remember none of it <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:31:19):
Well, and you wanna watch the stuff that's germane to the, you know, your program. Yeah,

James Thomson (00:31:24):
Yeah. I understand. And, and, and some of it is also you wanna watch the stuff that's like new and exciting. So like all the Vision Pro stuff that, that's kind of like, well this is, how are they gonna do this? You know what? Because you get the, the broad strokes in the other things, but then you get in like, how is this implemented? How what can I do? What can't I do? And yeah, so I've watched a lot of Vision Pro stuff, which is not like we haven't, we can't even order SDKs at this point. So, you know, I have front loaded my brain with all the information that is completely useless at this point.

Leo Laporte (00:31:58):
And may well change. I mean, I, I really get the feeling I likened it on one of our shows to a concept card that you might see at an auto show. I get the feeling that when it does come out, it may very be a somewhat different product. In fact, I'm bet I, I'm betting that the scary eyes in the front will be gone. <Laugh>. I don't think <laugh>,

James Thomson (00:32:15):
I, I I think they're a hundred percent staying. I think that's, you think so that's the whole thing of their design, because it's like they they are, they are a, nobody else has ever done it. So this thing stands out for good reason, even if it stands out in a way that I don't like. Yeah. but I think like, I, I get what they're trying to do that they're trying to kind of make it less cutting you off from the, the world. And that makes

Leo Laporte (00:32:41):
Sense. Yeah. But you are cut off and, and putting an uncanny valley pair of eyes on the front does not make you less cut off. I'm sorry. It just makes people holdt run away in the other direction. To be honest, I,

James Thomson (00:32:53):
I will say I haven't tried it. So like I,

Leo Laporte (00:32:56):
Neither has by way any Apple executive, I think it's telling that they didn't, nobody wore them, which means they're not ready. Right. That they're all simulated in the, in the videos. No,

James Thomson (00:33:07):
I, I mean, I think, like, I suspect the stuff is like three quarters there and I, I think that, you know, the, the, the foundations are probably working pretty well. I mean, from the sounds of the people I know who have got demos, like the technology, like the hardware hardware certainly was impressive. Yeah. Yeah. Some of the software, like I, I know some people that, that when they had their head scanned for the, the, the FaceTime thing, they didn't get a particularly pleasant looking avatar out of that. And, but, you know, I could see that stuff improving. I, I just, I, I, I, it's like, so when the iPad came out or before the iPad came out, when, when there was, it was announced and we got developer kits for it, we could write apps in the simulator. And same for the watch and same for other things.

(00:34:03):
Like we could write the apps and we could see them on a screen and we could interact with them, but it didn't give you the sense of what it would be like to actually use the thing, which affects how you build your apps. So there is a sort of, once you're actually using it, there's a feedback process of I'm playing with it, oh, this makes sense to do it this way. Or this is, you know, this thing is too far away from where your fingers would be. Or this button is too small or, or something. And I think there's gonna be a process for this as well is like, once we actually get to use them and see what it's like to use them, and this is such a shift in terms of like thinking and design. I mean, in some ways it's not because like the apps they're showing off are kind of like mostly 2D windows that you're moving around with 3D content.

(00:34:55):
But I, until I have one of those things on my face and I am actively running my code on it, I, I'm hesitant to pass judgment on it because I just don't know what it's like. And I, I have skepticism. I don't, I still don't know what it's for. Like I get, I get that this is like technologically possibly the most sophisticated piece of consumer electronics ever made, shall we say. I still don't get what it's for. But I haven't tried it. So that's the thing. I can't, I can't throw stones at it. Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko (00:35:37):
Specific specifically about the ma magic eyeballs, I'm not sure that, that, that could be, that could become the touch bar of the Vision Pro. That could be the thing that, okay, we really thought this, well, we, we had something. It turns out we didn't have anything here. We're gonna start to give you back all the buttons that you're complaining that you didn't have, you know? Well, and if they're gonna make less, the problem is version, those, those, those screens are one way to cut a couple hundred bucks outta the price, but not, well, not, not only that, but that's a display right at the very, very front of the device on a device that could be made lighter anyway. And you don't want weight at the front anyway. Right. The other, and another problem is that this is, I've been reading a lot more about like what like what designers of night vision goggles have been learning about.

(00:36:22):
Just the, just the mechanics of how to design something that you wear on your face and people are gonna be looking around through the world at. And another complaint that's coming through about this design is that because you have this screen that has to be, has, has to cover the entire front plate, you can't have cameras like right where your, where your pupils would be, which, and so they're gonna be lowered like another, like inch or so from where you're actually looking, which it remains to be seen how confusing that's gonna be. There's a, a paper that I read about, again, people who are designing these things for night vision, saying that even moving these down a little bit causes a bit of confusion because the brain it, it creates a whole bunch of problems where the brain adapts. And then when you take the goggles off, your, your brain now has to deal with the fact that there's this, there's this entirely new way of looking at the world.

(00:37:15):
So there are a lot of small things about it. It just, it just, and a lot of these things are gonna be maybe worth the expense, so to speak, because of the technology. But I it really changed my mind about, again, the, what I have to call derisively, the magic eyeball effect that has to really now be very, very important. It has to be crucial. It has to be a signature thing that says, oh my God, apple has figured something out here that no one else has figured out, and everybody has to start stealing this idea. It turns out to be such a great idea to have this screen facing outward, to make it worth like the extra weight and the extra changes that makes to the balance. And in my eye, I don't, and I don't think it's, it just looks, yeah. I think there's a reason why they didn't demo it to anybody at all under any circumstances during W W

James Thomson (00:38:01):
E C I. And I'm assuming that the eyes and that the like section of face that they're displaying is the same CG face that they're capturing for FaceTime. I think

Andy Ihnatko (00:38:11):
Everybody don't thinks that is. Yeah.

James Thomson (00:38:13):
Yeah. Yeah. So I, I do think that there is gonna be like that slight extra uncanny valley to that Yeah. View, because if it is, if it is that, but still I haven't seen it. So I, I like, this could be like, when I see it in person, I will go. Right, I get it. This makes sense. Yeah, so the, I I am, I'm hesitant, but curious enough that I will probably drop three and a half thousand dollars <laugh> to see how it

Leo Laporte (00:38:47):
Works. Well, another data point from scooter X and our I R C, the Apple Vision Pro video is now the most viewed Apple video on YouTube with 50 million views in the first week. So there's certainly interest in it. People wanna see it. Yeah. And I mean like

James Thomson (00:39:04):
This is I think probably the most kind of futuristic thing they've done for a long time. I mean, like the iPhone, when we all got the iPhone, we were like, this is great. It has a great user and face, this entirely makes sense. You know, we, they've done like amazing things, but it, it, it's a phone. You know, we understand this, it's a touchscreen. We've kind of seen those before. Not as good as this, this thing is like, oh, and here's a spaceship and we're

Leo Laporte (00:39:33):
Right. They're boldly gone. I've

James Thomson (00:39:35):
<Laugh>. Yeah. I've, I've never flown a spaceship before. I dunno what it's like <laugh>, right?

Leo Laporte (00:39:40):
Yeah. We don't know. That's right. And I think Apple deserves, and a lot of people give it a lot of credit for what Apple's done in the past, but this is not like anything Apple's done in the past. And it, it's a bit of a reach for them.

Alex Lindsay (00:39:52):
The, I think the pricing also helps scare off a lot of the, a lot of folks that, that aren't sure <laugh>. So, so you're gonna end up with a lot of people that are there testing it. I think that it, it is I think that I, I think that they'll probably keep the eyes in some for, they're gonna have to keep on developing 'em. I think that they're, they're part of the interface to tell you that someone's looking at you right when

Leo Laporte (00:40:11):
They wrong. No, I understand why they're

Alex Lindsay (00:40:12):
There. They tell you why they're not there. But I think

Leo Laporte (00:40:14):
It's also the thing that's gonna, that's people are gonna fixate on as being the creepiest part of it. And, and I think that that's something Apple's gotta fight against. Hey James, let me ask you if it's Mac o os or iOS or its own os you tooted the day of ww d c that it looks like they're out of sync, that iOS 17, but X R O s 1.0, somebody responded to you that he didn't think it is iOS. Do, do you have a better sense of that now?

James Thomson (00:40:40):
I'm not a hundred percent sure. I mean, I think like, it, like any of Apple's operating systems, they're all generally, or certainly the, the, the iOS derivatives, like, you know, what's on a home pod or what's on a watch or whatever. I think they're all kind of like, there's a lot of core stuff that's the same.

Leo Laporte (00:40:57):
It's, it's the mock kernel plus the base core os on top of that. Yeah.

James Thomson (00:41:02):
And you know, that I, I don't think that this is anything radically different from that, except it's got like a bunch of real time stuff in it. Right. so, you know, like I, I think all of these, all of these oss are related, you know, they, they're at least very close cousins. They're

Leo Laporte (00:41:21):
Cousins. Yeah. yeah. That makes, that's fair. Yeah. This is the stack that apple put in the keynote. And so there are iOS frameworks at the top level as well as special frameworks that are spatial for the particular Vision Pro and the spatial audio engine plus the Foveated renderer and the multi app 3D engine. Those are all unique to the Vision Pro. That's interesting. Yeah.

James Thomson (00:41:47):
But that big CoreOS section at the bottom,

Leo Laporte (00:41:49):
That's

James Thomson (00:41:50):
A lot. Probably the same thing. That's Yeah. Right. That's on everything, right?

Leo Laporte (00:41:53):
Yeah. same kernel

Andy Ihnatko (00:41:55):
Across all

Leo Laporte (00:41:56):
Platforms. Yeah. And mock Colonel. I

James Thomson (00:41:58):
I think so. I mean, like the, like even my monitor is running some

Leo Laporte (00:42:04):
<Laugh>, you know? Yeah. Even your studio. You have a studio display then I know <laugh>. Yes. Your little iOS display. <Laugh>. Yeah. Let's take a little break. James Thompson, our guest, P Cal's author. If you have not yet installed Peacock Peak Calc on your iOS, your iPad os, and your Mac os go to pcal.com and check it out. It and of course, don't forget dice. If you are a if you are a tabletop gamer by pea calc, infinite polyhedral dye just for you and a 3d emulator so you can see your dye rolling. An ar our show today brought to you by, oh, and I forgot Alex Lindsay's also here in Antico. You guys are also here. <Laugh>. Serious. Seriously, I want you, I don't mean to No, no. When we have somebody at, when, when Paul McCartney or Ring goes on, we gotta talk to him. That's

Andy Ihnatko (00:43:03):
No. This, this, this, this week, this week, James, this week. You, this week, you're Diana Ross. We're the Supreme

Leo Laporte (00:43:09):
<Laugh>.

James Thomson (00:43:10):
We're happy

Leo Laporte (00:43:11):
Beyonce. We're Destiny's Child. I get it. Yeah. Ooh, <laugh>.

James Thomson (00:43:16):
I, I, I will accept those more than Paul McCartney

Leo Laporte (00:43:18):
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(00:44:10):
It shakes up easily. It tastes fantastic. Ag one's been around for a long time, since 2010. It's become part of a million routines since I've, you know, when I started doing the ag, one thing I asked around and everybody I know Pruitt said, oh yeah, I've been using that for years. It's the best all-in-one solution for daily nutrition. Save you time, confusion, money, a lot of money. <Laugh>, I was spending a lot of money. $3 a day, little less than $3 a day for G one. And it's got everything. It's got supplements, it's got probiotics, prebiotics. This is the best bang for your buck. A seamless, easy daily habit that covers your day's nutritional basis. 75 high quality minerals, vitamins, pre, and probiotics. So if you're looking for a simpler and cost effective supplement routine, G one, my Friends from Athletic Greens.

(00:45:03):
In fact, if you order right now and get a subscription, you'll get a free one year supply of Vitamin D and five free travel packs. Those great travel packs with your first purchase of a subscription, go to athletic greens.com/mac break. My mouth is actually watering, cuz I look forward to this every morning. It tastes really good. Athletic greens.com/mac break. Please use that address so they know you saw it here. Athletic greens.com/mac break. Is there anything in iOS 17 James you were particularly excited about or interested in? I guess you could put iPad OS as well if you want.

James Thomson (00:45:40):
I think the, the, I mean there was, there was lots of little things that, you know,

Leo Laporte (00:45:46):
That's how it's been for the last few years, right? It's, it's all kind of a little incremental.

James Thomson (00:45:50):
I mean, I think there was like, I, I genuinely said like by the time we got to the keynote just before the Vision Pro, like if that had been all there was, I would've been pretty happy Yeah. With the, the, the, the show because like there was enough stuff like things like, you know, the improvements to autocorrect and stuff like that, that's gonna affect like billions of people. You can

Leo Laporte (00:46:14):
Finally swear <laugh> with that ducking Yes. That Ducking Auto. Correct. Yes. Good. Finally.

James Thomson (00:46:20):
And you know, there was little things like, you know, just the being able to share air tags amongst people that is gonna be so useful. So that like if my, you know, like if I put an air tag on my bike and my wife rides it, she's not gonna get like a constant warning that she's being tracked, right.

Leo Laporte (00:46:39):
Because, so annoying.

James Thomson (00:46:40):
Yeah. You know, so there's, there's lots of little things like that. But I would say like the most, the thing that caught me the most was the, the return of interactive widgets. Because that's, I think gonna make a lot of stuff a lot easier in terms of having like very quick access to doing stuff. You know, like you just want to check off a task or, or do something and you don't wanna fire up an entire app to do it. And so I have my own history with widgets. Yes,

Leo Laporte (00:47:18):
You do.

James Thomson (00:47:19):
May remember <laugh> back in the distant past of 2014 when we got our first widgets the first old school widgets cause they're completely different mechanism. I built peacock widget because there was a calculator widget that Apple did that was on the Mac and they didn't do one on iOS. And I thought, well they've done it on the Mac, so I'll do it on the Mac and I'll do it on iOS as well. And you know, as I said before, like the core logic of Pcal is small self-contained. So I just stuffed it in there and it released, it was very popular. It got featured by Apple on the store as one of the best examples of a widget. And then a few weeks after the introduction, I got contacted by Apple and I was told I had to remove the widget <laugh> because I quote widgets couldn't perform calculations <laugh>, that's so Apple.

(00:48:24):
And, and it was the kind of one half of your company is featuring this as a great example. And then the other half is telling me that widgets are not allowed to do this, so can't do it. And I tweeted about that cuz there was a bit of back and forth and then they basically said, look, final decision, this is what's gonna happen. There is no higher power you can appeal to just accept it, remove it, move on. So I tweeted about that. Then I went out for dinner and when I came back it had been retweeted a lot and had ended up on like C N N and places like that. And I was like, oh no, because like Apple, yeah, apple says don't run to the press, it never works. I think that language is in the the, the user, the review guidelines.

(00:49:21):
That's not true. <Laugh>, you know, running to the press does actually work sometimes, sometimes. But I hadn't actually intended it like that. But you know, people like Jason and whatever had picked this up and retweeted Christina Warren said stuff about it and it got big coverage and I got a phone call the next day from Apple saying, we have changed our mind. You can do any, you can, you know, widgets can do anything they like please carry on. And it was a extremely surreal time an extremely stressful time because I'd spent a lot of work on this to, to get them to working. And it turned out to be an extremely lucrative time as well because it raised the profile, profile of Peacock enormously <laugh>. And like that year I bought, I think it was, I, I bought a pretty nice retina iMac and I had a holiday in the sun and that was how I relaxed from the stress of, of, of all that <laugh>.

(00:50:25):
And you know, I think the thing was like engineering, the engineering side were absolutely happy with people doing this. They built these things to be flexible and you know, whatever the mark, the app store editorial people were happy with it. Cuz look, hey, there's a thing. People like it, it's great, it's functional. Somebody somewhere, I don't know who had a problem with this and it, their, their, their mind was changed. I don't know, by the swell of public opinion or by somebody higher up the chain or whatever. But that change that happened and what that actually meant, it wasn't just me because there were other people as well who were told, nah, your widget's doing too many things. We don't like this cuz we're apple and we like things to be simple and stressful.

Leo Laporte (00:51:12):
Was there any technical reason? I mean is it like killing battery or something? I mean, that you can think of?

James Thomson (00:51:18):
I, the thing was, I would say for peak out, no, because like the, the core of peacock, like was running on 68,000 Motorola chips, <laugh>,

Leo Laporte (00:51:28):
You know,

James Thomson (00:51:29):
It's not that heavy. It's

Leo Laporte (00:51:32):
Math baby. It's math, it's not, you know, you know, no matter, no matter how tired the hamster was at the end of the day,

James Thomson (00:51:38):
Yeah, I mean,

Leo Laporte (00:51:39):
CPU could still generate math.

James Thomson (00:51:41):
You, you know, adding numbers together really like basic stuff for CPUs. There may have been, I, I think like I was pushing the bands of how much memory the widget was using, but there was a fixed limit and it was like, it was very low. It was like 64 megabytes. You could use that and then, you know, your, your widget got killed. And so there, there was a lot of optimization to fit it into that space, but it worked and it fitted fine. So

Leo Laporte (00:52:12):
That's actually an amazing number to think that you needed 64 megabytes to implement a widget <laugh>. It's kinda mind boggling.

Leo Laporte (00:52:22):
But,

James Thomson (00:52:23):
But like, fast forward to this WWDC announcement, and we've had these non-interactive widgets for the last couple of years, since 2020 which are completely different. They're written in Swift ui and you can have buttons on them, but if the button just triggers a U R L, which can open your app and do a specific,

Leo Laporte (00:52:43):
They were basically images on the screen. They were not,

James Thomson (00:52:46):
Yeah, I mean, like, they effectively you can have some interactive like timers and things on them, I think. Anyway, point being that like you could do something like in Dice by Peacock, I've got widgets and it's got like an array of dice on it, and you press one of those and it'll launch the app and it'll tell the app to roll that dice. So it works as a kind of quick launcher. But what these now do is you're you can have a button that when you press it, it will execute a piece of code and then you can transmit information back to the

Leo Laporte (00:53:21):
Widget. They're interactive and you can, you can do something with them, which is kinda what you did when you first did the widget, right? Way back when. Yeah. Yeah.

James Thomson (00:53:29):
So I was listening to upgrade with Jason and Mike Hurley, and they were, they had just come out of like some briefings or whatever, and they said James can't make a calculator with this. You know, it's not, it's not meant for that. It's, it's, you know, it, it can't be done. Basically, I think who they, well,

Leo Laporte (00:53:56):
Apple, they, or, or Mike and Jason, they, apple said, did they mention you by name and said, don't James, don't get excited.

James Thomson (00:54:05):
I have, I have no knowledge as to what transpired. Okay. Who they talked to.

Leo Laporte (00:54:10):
But somebody said,

James Thomson (00:54:13):
All I heard was you are not allowed to do this. And so what I did was, before the end of that day, I had a working prototype of peak a running as a widget. You

Leo Laporte (00:54:25):
Were

James Thomson (00:54:26):
Alu for punishment

Leo Laporte (00:54:26):
Environment.

James Thomson (00:54:28):
Well, it, it was like,

Leo Laporte (00:54:30):
It was a challenge. They threw down the gauntlet.

James Thomson (00:54:32):
I, I mean, they didn't throw it down, but it was, it was like, the best way to get me to do something is to tell me that I am not allowed to do

Leo Laporte (00:54:39):
That.

James Thomson (00:54:39):
Yes. <laugh>. So I, I, I have a prototype that, you know, it's just, it's a really basic thing and it looks terrible, but it, it's got buttons on it. You can push the buttons and you get numbers, you know, so,

Leo Laporte (00:54:52):
But are you afraid that if you did that, they would, they said then say, well, yes, technically you're able, but we're not gonna let you. W would you have the same issue that you had last time?

James Thomson (00:55:02):
This is indeed the billion dollar question. You know, what is gonna happen if I submit this? And I don't know the answer. And the thing is, there's nothing in the rules to say that you can't do it. So what they would have to do is they would have to say something like well, we've now got a rule which says, you cannot have more than four buttons, or something like that. Or, you know, but they have to actually specify and they have to draw. Like, you can't, it's very difficult when you're saying like, these things can be interactive and they can write run code, but they can't run too much <laugh> or they can't be too, I, I mean, like for example, if I made a dice by peak out widget, almost exactly the same look as the current one, and it's got a row of buttons for different dice, I could have a thing. You press a D 20 and it gives you back a number between one and 20. Is that too much calculations? Is that, you know, am am I crossing the line with that? But I'm not, or am I not crossing the line with that by am crossing it with a calculator and, and somebody somewhere has to sit down and they have to formalize a rule, or they have to just, you know, kind of what I hope is that they will say, Hey, this is really cool. You've done it again. This is brilliant <laugh>.

James Thomson (00:56:30):
You know, we all

Leo Laporte (00:56:31):
Hope so. We all,

James Thomson (00:56:32):
We all miss,

Andy Ihnatko (00:56:33):
I like young man, I like the cut of your gym. You're a rule breaker and a maverick. Or I could use someone like you on our team <laugh>.

James Thomson (00:56:39):
Exactly. Like, you know Tim Cook is gonna sit down and he's gonna say, you know, we didn't think this should be done, but I've seen it and I was wrong.

Andy Ihnatko (00:56:49):
The Grinches, Grinchy heart <laugh> went four sizes that day. <Laugh>, sorry,

James Thomson (00:56:58):
Tim Cook, not a Grinch.

Andy Ihnatko (00:56:59):
He's approved. He is anti grin. He is very, he is on record anti grin. Yes. He said as such,

Leo Laporte (00:57:05):
Destroy, he may look like Winnie the Poh, but he's anti Grinch. Okay, fine.

Andy Ihnatko (00:57:09):
So, so, so Leo, look before, not,

Leo Laporte (00:57:13):
Or who is never gonna be to an event anyway, so who cares.

James Thomson (00:57:17):
Yeah. But some of us, our entire income stream is based, understand based upon the Yes. The generosity of Apple. So yes, I say nothing negative

Leo Laporte (00:57:26):
About Apple. No, they're wonderful. Such

James Thomson (00:57:27):
Wonderful situations. Wonderful. and also Apple is not one person. Apple is like a thousand little divisions. Absolutely. Who all have different opinions.

Leo Laporte (00:57:35):
You're hoping Andy, that they don't say, James, you are spunky and I hate Spunk. <Laugh>, you got spunk. That would be the other way. The other way to interrupt. You got Moxie kid got mie. Hey, let me just, yeah, I completely parenthetically sidebar. But do you use Apple's random number generator, or do you create your own, or how do you make sure that those D numbers, those dice numbers are

James Thomson (00:58:01):
Random? I use apples. The apple has a good,

Leo Laporte (00:58:04):
They have a good pseudo random. Is it pseudo? But it is pseudo.

James Thomson (00:58:07):
It is pseudo, but it's, it's good. And it's, it's genuinely good enough for like Roman D 20. Okay. Or something like that. Yeah. But I also, I don't, I don't know what the number is at that point. What I do is when I roll the dice, I'm, I'm simulating the physics of it. So I'm, I'm, oh, I have a 3D object with weight. Oh, that's cool. And I'm, I'm throwing it, but I throw it and put a different, like, spin and force.

Leo Laporte (00:58:33):
Oh, that's really cool. You're not just saying gimme a number from one to 20, you actually

James Thomson (00:58:37):
No, no. So

Leo Laporte (00:58:38):
You're simulating the roll of the dice.

James Thomson (00:58:40):
So that's where I use the random number stuff to work out. Like just how much force. Oh, that's cool. And put on the dice as you roll it, and then the physics engine takes over and it bounces around, and then once it stops moving, you have a number. I think that's pretty. So I, it's not like I say, yeah, it's not, like I say, just gimme a number between one and 20. So I mean, I, I think it's pretty random. You can also, you can set it to auto roll and then export statistics if you want to know like exactly that this is not weighted or anything like that. So yeah, it, it, I think the number I, I stake my role game play on, on it being correct.

Andy Ihnatko (00:59:27):
You'll sta you'll stack it against any dice tower ever made by Yes. On, on Thingiverse. Yes.

James Thomson (00:59:33):
I am gonna make at some point I am gonna make a virtual dice tower. Just

Andy Ihnatko (00:59:38):
Oh, God bless you, sir.

Leo Laporte (00:59:40):
<Laugh>. I said,

Andy Ihnatko (00:59:41):
I'm not, I'm not, and I'm not, I'm not being sarcastic. I I love, I I love your apps because they're, they're like, they're, they're like the food at a diner where it's like, here, here is an, here is here's a cheese omelet, but it's gonna be executed absolutely perfectly. This is at, it's at the pinnacle of what cooking can be, simply because it's a basic thing, but executed with no excuses, no mistakes, no factor of it has not been thought about. Even when you think it's done, they couldn't enhance it. They, you, you enhance your stuff more. So when I, so when I think that you're adding a dice tower, I'm not saying, oh gosh. It's like, haha. It's funny that no, this is exactly what this app is supposed to be.

Leo Laporte (01:00:21):
It'll be the Socratic Love your work, the Socratic Dice Tower. Right. The this,

Andy Ihnatko (01:00:25):
This is, this is why, this is why I am happy to be one of the pips to your Gladys Knight any day <laugh> week.

James Thomson (01:00:31):
I, I, I've decided, I'm now, I'm Jimmy Page. If we're gonna pivot into different band <laugh> a anyway, I mean, I will put entirely over an engineered cheese omelet on my

Leo Laporte (01:00:45):
<Laugh>.

James Thomson (01:00:47):
Right?

Leo Laporte (01:00:47):
It's the platonic deal of Dice Towers. I think James is in the pantheon of apple developers for that reason. And I think that's one of the things that makes it was first the Mac, but in general, apple, I hope they give people credit because what one of the things that makes Apple so appealing in all of its hardware is that there are a few handful of developers we used to call 'em the delicious library guys. Right. Who put that extra care into their apps who are really in, in me. You know, they're not just cranking 'em out, which is something you see on the Windows side more. Yeah. and I think that's what makes Apple unique. And so thank you, James, because, and Apple really, honestly, apple should absolutely venerate you because that is the distinction in my opinion, between Apple software and everybody else's software.

James Thomson (01:01:36):
I, I, I will be happy just to be tolerated <laugh> and

Leo Laporte (01:01:41):
Tolerated not venerated, huh? Okay. <laugh>. Yeah.

James Thomson (01:01:44):
I mean, you know, I I I I humbly accept your praise, but there are a lot of people out there I think doing really good stuff and

Leo Laporte (01:01:55):
Think, oh yeah. It's not just you. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah,

James Thomson (01:01:58):
Yeah. I, I, you know, like, you, you, and it's not just like people with gray hair. I mean, I think there are, there are a lot of young, younger developers who are doing really cool

Leo Laporte (01:02:09):
Stuff. No. And look at the Apple design winners to give you a, a good example of that. Exactly.

James Thomson (01:02:13):
Yeah. And, and it's like, I'm not bitter that I've never won one of those <laugh> No, I mean, I, I entered once back in like, oh, God, was it, I don't think I entered while I was an Apple employee, because that would be wrong, but <laugh> I think it was shortly afterwards or, or something. But anyway drag thing, if you, if anybody remembers

Leo Laporte (01:02:37):
Drag Oh, I love Drake.

James Thomson (01:02:38):
Yeah. that, that was entered for one once, and I basically got told and, and I, I was asked to submit it, so I submitted it and then they said no. And I was like, well, why did you ask me?

Leo Laporte (01:02:54):
Oh my God. So I

James Thomson (01:02:55):
Never did anything from there. And, and nowadays it is pretty much a kind of, you know, don't call us, we'll call you. We, we will find your apps. And, and I think it's right that they're celebrating the, the, the new stuff and not the, the stuff that's been around for 30 years. Because everybody knows not everybody. I, I mean, a lot of people know peak a and, and know these things, so there's no point.

Leo Laporte (01:03:21):
Well, I give you the unofficial design

James Thomson (01:03:25):
Award. I will take the, the, the MAC break, a weekly design

Leo Laporte (01:03:29):
Award. Do you have actually been many times been a pick on Mac Break as you well know? So

James Thomson (01:03:34):
I, I, I, yes. I, I, even when I don't catch the show as often as I would like, whenever my like Google alerts or whatever fire to say that I'd been mentioned

Leo Laporte (01:03:45):
Again, again, he has all

Andy Ihnatko (01:03:48):
So can I, I'll just, I'll just quickly say that, Leo. You're absolutely right. Like, the only, the only thing that I really miss about not having an iPhone about having Android is that I, I love, I love my, my Android hardware. I love the things that I can do with the Android that I can't do with the iPhone, but the creativity and the, I don't know, the, the artistry of the apps just isn't there. They're great, they're solid. They do what they have to do. I can't remember the last time that I downloaded an app to my Android phone that gave me the level of delight that most most iPhone apps do. That's something that, that's something that Apple really needs to be praised for. As, as, as much as we, as much as we laugh about <laugh>, about, you know, the interactions between Apple and developers, time and time again, they've created something that attracts the sort of people that, oh my God, this is a wonderful canvas. I can be as weird as I want, I can, I can execute a program to an app to the extent of my individuality here. And Google just has never been able to do that. I think, yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:04:47):
There was, we used to call it the delicious generation cuz of a delicious library. Right. that's, those are very sph all of those <laugh> we've come a long way since then. But there is absolutely a care and attention to detail and even more an an attention to aesthetics yes. On, on the Apple side that just is really lacking everywhere else. And that's one of the reasons we still love our Macs. And Apple really needs to understand that, you know, they put that into their hardware and their os. But I mean, and and

Alex Lindsay (01:05:16):
I, I think that that's also why it's hard to get Mac, use Apple users when they're, whether it's an iPhone or Mac or an iPad to go to another platform Yeah. Is because you open it up and you just feel like the fit and finish is gone. Yeah. Like you, you know, you're just kinda like you went from you know, something that everything's kind of nice and rounded and fitting and everything fits together. And then everything's kind of like, it's all still there. It's just not pretty anymore.

James Thomson (01:05:38):
<Laugh> I mean, the, the thing is like, you know, when when Apple does something Yeah. Let's say the new settings up or something and, and everybody's tearing, oh God, yeah. Te tearing stuff apart or whatever. And, and like, oh, Apple's completely lost the, the ability to do design, blah, blah, blah <laugh>. And then you actually compare all that stuff to any other platform and it is still superior. You know, I think that's the thing that people forget is like, yes, we complain about this stuff, but we complain about this stuff cuz we love it. Right. And because it's n it's, you know, we feel, ah, this could be a slightly more Mac like, or, you know, this what, whatever it is. But yeah, I, I mean I've been using a, a few other, you know, like show me the television that the user interface is in any way. Good. Yeah. I've never seen one

Alex Lindsay (01:06:29):
Horrible. Yeah.

James Thomson (01:06:31):
And even like I got I just got the, one of the hobo Libra two e-readers and it's nice, but the interface isn't quite as good as it should be. Yeah. and it's the same on on, on every piece of consumer electronics. It's just like, it's functional but it's not consistent and it's not whatever. So yeah. I mean, I, I've still got like sat next to me. I have a copy of the Human Interface guidelines Yes. From Yes. 91 or whatever

Alex Lindsay (01:07:05):
It is. Yeah. I was just gonna refer to that. Yeah.

James Thomson (01:07:07):
Yeah. And that, that, that book was like my Bible. Yes. When I was developing software, it was like, read this, internalize it. I, I literally, at university we had my favorite class of, of like the entire computing science course that I did was human interface design class. And what they would do is they would take something like the open and save boxes on the Mac and they would completely disassemble it and say, you know, this is why they made this choice. You know, this is how, and we would do things like we would do, you know, user testing and it's like, let, let's find out what the best way to do something is to make it easy for users or whatever. And I think that that kind of class is still ingrained in my brain as I want to do this. Right. And, and those guidelines and everything else. So I, I think that is I, and even people who like are young, that they didn't encounter that stuff, or they've started on iOS or whatever, it's still, there is the, the, the quality there that inspires people to make more quality things so that they look good on the

Leo Laporte (01:08:21):
Platform. I was so nostalgic for it. I went out and found a copy on eBay, I think of the original inside Macintosh notebooks. And yeah, they, I don't know, I don't know if it was Steve Jobs or I doubt it was, I'm sure there were others. But for some reason Apple really had this vision, this unified vision in 1984 and continued it, it's attenuated a little bit and things like settings maybe are an example of where it's not quite huge too, that's very modal. But if you compare it with settings on Windows <laugh> control on Windows. Exactly. I, I mean I always, you'll appreciate <laugh>,

James Thomson (01:09:01):
I was setting up Windows 11 in VMware last week to do something and it's like, oh, I, this, I hate this. I actively ate this. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:09:11):
We're a little, we're a little prejudiced.

Alex Lindsay (01:09:12):
And yeah. And I think that one of the things that, that did drive that is Steve Jobs very early on learned calligraphy. Right? Or, or, or he

Leo Laporte (01:09:20):
Was an athlete for sure.

Alex Lindsay (01:09:21):
Yes. Absolutely. And, and really was into topography and everything else. And topography is kind of the, in many ways, the finest version of attention to detail. Cuz you're talking about the space between things and how big the serifs are and, and what the, you know, X height is and, you know, and, and, and all of those things make a difference. And I think when you're paying attention to things at that level it's one of the things, like for instance, when I use Keynote, you can tell <laugh> there's difference between Keynote and other. Absolutely.

Leo Laporte (01:09:49):
Yeah.

Alex Lindsay (01:09:49):
Yeah. How it handles the font. Like it's just, it's just a different way of anti-icing spacing. Everything else is just a little bit better and it gives it a higher, you know gravity to it. And so that's the thing when you pay attention to that level of detail. Yeah. And again, I think that a lot of folks that use Apple products are either consciously or unconsciously or just used to that. That's how everything works. You know,

Leo Laporte (01:10:11):
I got, I gotta take a break. I want to come back. I really do want to delve into a little bit iOS 17 and Mac os Sonoma and iPad OS 17. And, and and some of the features that you're looking forward to James and things that you've noticed, we gotta go, go deeper on that. But it's really great to have James Thompson here legendary Apple designer and developer creator of Pcal and, and P Dice. He's the P man and we're glad to have him. I

James Thomson (01:10:38):
Think we need to change that.

Leo Laporte (01:10:39):
That's not probably what you wanna have in your lower third. Also, Andy Ko is here. He's the G-man and and Alex Lindsay, he is, I don't know what man, but we, we, we have the, we have the the entire Justice League United here on the show for you, <laugh> today, our show brought to you by Melissa, the M man, a leading global data quality, identity verification, and address management solutions provider. They're the ones, they've been doing this since, believe it or longer than James has been doing Pcal since 1985. Specializing in global intelligence solutions so that organizations can unlock accurate data for a more compelling customer view. And you know what? Every year they get the awards. G2 is once again named Melissa's Clean Suite and Data Quality Suite leaders by g2, the leading peer-to-peer software platform in the 2023 data quality and address verification Spring report, also named momentum Leader and High Performer in the same reports across the small business, mid-market and enterprise segments.

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James Thomson (01:15:16):
I think it's like 91 91

Leo Laporte (01:15:18):
Or something.

James Thomson (01:15:18):
Yeah, I've got, I've got a stack of the, all the original books that I got. I

Leo Laporte (01:15:23):
Love this. Yeah,

James Thomson (01:15:25):
Because I just couldn't throw them away. Did you

Leo Laporte (01:15:28):
Start with Pascal or

James Thomson (01:15:30):
Yep. You did. Yeah. It was PAs Pascal. That was what our university taught Yeah. As, as the language. And we used think Pascal, think

Leo Laporte (01:15:38):
Great Pascal. It was very fast. And

James Thomson (01:15:40):
I I love the

Leo Laporte (01:15:41):
Macintosh programmers workshop, though. That was an amazing tool, an IDE that I don't think has ever been surpassed. And I used that for 68,000. Assembler <laugh> was

James Thomson (01:15:51):
Really awesome. Yeah. I I used that for, I ported programming language compiler Wow. To that as a, as an MPW tool. And yes, that was, that was something. But I think Pascal was a nice simple thing that Yeah. The debugger and think Pascal was one of the best. And I believe one of the people who worked on Think Pascal was Rich Siegel. Yes. Oh, of BB edit fame. I didn't know that. So yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:16:14):
They were in Boston. That's right. Yeah.

James Thomson (01:16:18):
And yeah, that's where I got started. And we were doing our coursework at university in Think Pascal and I realized that the copy of Think Pascal that they gave us had all the Mac toolbox stuff with it. Wow. And I was like, Hey, I could actually write an app with this. So I went out and I bought inside Mac, like one, two, I think I got like 1, 2, 3, and six <laugh> and I missed, or seven and I missed like some critical things. So the first version of Peacock, if you ran it on a color machine, oh my bad things happened, but it, but yeah, it was like I bought, I bought all those books that vast expense. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:16:59):
And,

James Thomson (01:16:59):
And

Leo Laporte (01:17:00):
Just

James Thomson (01:17:00):
That for the summer, A

Leo Laporte (01:17:01):
Huge use of shelf space too. <Laugh>.

James Thomson (01:17:04):
Yeah. Well they, they, they're still there.

Leo Laporte (01:17:06):
Apple's seven foot shelf right there,

James Thomson (01:17:09):
<Laugh>. But, but yeah, it, it was, you know, I don't wanna say it's the best a Apple documentation has ever been, because that is mean to the people who are currently doing documentation. It's pretty darn

Andy Ihnatko (01:17:23):
Good. But it was,

James Thomson (01:17:23):
Yeah, it was really consistent and solid. Bruce

Andy Ihnatko (01:17:27):
Tini and Scott Ster and that, that group, they were so good. So good. And not just that as, as objects as Bo as bun as bound paperback books. They're just so handsome to Yeah. They, they were, they're they're definitely designed to be pulled off the shelf and splayed and stacks on top, <laugh> on top in layers on top of your desk as you work your way through a problem. But man, there's just something about the binding of those books that even when they were really, really outta date, it's like, I can't get rid of these. It's like a leather, like a leather bound book of poetry

James Thomson (01:18:00):
Where it's like, it's a, it's a first edition. Yeah. You know, like,

Andy Ihnatko (01:18:02):
Yeah. It's like, it's like, it's like a beautiful edition of James Joyce Ulysses. I know. I will never open this, but I just enjoy holding it.

James Thomson (01:18:09):
Yep, exactly.

Andy Ihnatko (01:18:11):
You use Swift now entirely in Xcode.

James Thomson (01:18:15):
Nope. so I, so I'm using Pcal was, well, PCAL was written in Pascal hand converted to c a c plus plus wrapper around that. Wow. Then an objective C wrapper around that, then a swift wrapper around that. So the, the analogy that I always use with peak calc is, if you remember Star Trek, the motion picture where they discover that the, the enormous entity that is threatening them, like right at the center of it is the original Voyager Probe Ger. Yeah. And then there's all this just layers around it. <Laugh>. That is what Peacock is. So some of a lot of my code is objective C at this point. And, you know, because Pcal has been around long enough, some of it's rewritten, some of it new stuff like widgets is all Swift and Swift UI whatever, but there's no real point in rewriting existing working code as you write new stuff.

(01:19:17):
Yes. and when I did Dice, dice was like it was a spinoff of the about screen from Peacock, and I was challenged by Jason Snell to make a Dice Rolling app, and I decided I would make one and ship one in. I think I gave myself a week, and I actually, it took me two weeks from New Project to being on the app store was like two weeks. Wow. but because I was reusing a lot of peak out code in that, that is also objective C and remains objective C. So I'm, I am Simil, I'm a contradiction in that I simultaneously like to adopt new, exciting things as quickly as possible, but I'm also extremely conservative in some of the technology choices I make. Because now this stuff works.

Leo Laporte (01:20:07):
If it works, don't change it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I mean, you must have to write a lot of glue code to keep it all working together.

James Thomson (01:20:16):
No, I mean, it's, it's not actually too bad. You can call Swift and Objective C you can interoperate between them Right. Very easily. And you can have, you can have one bit of your app being Swift UI and one bit being just regular UI care. It's, it's actually pretty good for, for that sort of stuff.

Leo Laporte (01:20:33):
So actually I wanna kinda stick with 3d because you really did do a early 3D app, you know, so you, you kind of, you were right on that bandwagon from day one. Have you, is are the interfaces for Vision Os similar, different, better, worse? I mean,

James Thomson (01:20:57):
It, it pretty similar. I mean, everything, what, what they're trying to encourage developers to use is Swift ui, which they've extended out for 3D stuff. And, and, but you can, you know, you can still port over your UI kit app as far as I can tell. You know, the, the, there's also reality kit is what they were have been using for AR stuff previously which exists and has been extended in,

Leo Laporte (01:21:31):
So none of that breaks all of that stuff is continuing with additions. Yeah. I

James Thomson (01:21:35):
Mean, I, I think there's gonna be things that I need to do, like with Dice, I'll need to enhance things because like, as I say, I said before, the scene kit, which is the main thing Dice uses isn't a thing that you can really use for 3d. But I have this reality kit test mode, which I use for doing the AR stuff. And you know, I, I know that I can build that out fairly easily and, and have something that will work in 3d. I mean, I, I am, I haven't like, dug deep into things like the hand gesture stuff and like how, you know, will, will I be able to like pick up a dice with my hand?

Leo Laporte (01:22:15):
Oh, that would be cool.

James Thomson (01:22:17):
Roll it. And I, I, I think that might be possible.

Leo Laporte (01:22:20):
You have to look at the D and then go with your fingers. You'd have, can you create new gestures or do you have to use their existing I

James Thomson (01:22:30):
Gesture No gesture. I think you can, I I think you can use stuff and you can use direct interaction with objects. Interesting. So I mean, I, I don't think it's gonna be a case that you, you have to do it like the, the sort of the pinching your fingers together, right? And looking at stuff. I think there could be some hands-on stuff

Andy Ihnatko (01:22:51):
That that's, that's an interest. Those are the questions I'm gonna find really, really interesting. Where I think that sometimes you get sort of like an inter, you get into a problem where it's like interface s sch amorphism where, hey, if I wanna roll the dice, this actual real world table in front of me, the the obvious way to do it is that I'm gonna have, I'm gonna let the user reach out with their hand and pick up the dice and roll them when that could be cool and fun. But when you get to the part where people like this app and they actually want to use it, maybe they would just rather have like a hovering widget they can just tap on. And then like the, a Dice Cup simply raises up on its own as if magically shakes it and then dumps itself out.

James Thomson (01:23:29):
I, I mean, I, I think that is the case. And I think like if you were actually with your Vision Pro on playing Dungeons and Dragons over FaceTime, let us say, you might just want to have a little window off of the side with, you know, your, your dice by pcal in it, and you tap a button or, or gesture at it and roll the dice. You, you probably don't wanna be sitting like in a cave surrounded by dragons. You know, while that would be cool. I don't know that that is like the, the, you know, I don't think people specifically roll dice or do maths as a, as a singular task, you know it

Andy Ihnatko (01:24:08):
Doesn't, it doesn't need to be immersive. I don't need to believe that the dice are there <laugh>.

James Thomson (01:24:13):
But on the other hand, wouldn't it be cool as a mode that you

Andy Ihnatko (01:24:16):
Could do Yeah, I do. I so like, like a, like a, like a demon just simply spawns from like a fiery pit on the, on the middle of the table, <laugh> throws, crushes, ORs into the shapes of cubes, throws them away as they scream. And then, oh, look, eight roll question.

James Thomson (01:24:34):
Yes. I mean, I mean, it's like, what I like is taking like the most sophisticated, as I say, consumer product ever with all these super high end processors and all this stuff, <laugh> and basically generating a number between one and 20,

Andy Ihnatko (01:24:52):
Who's good <laugh>, who's gonna, who gonna set, set your set, set your site even lower? Who's gonna have the first flashlight app for, for vision <laugh>? I, you know, well, what happens when the dye roll rolls off the table? <Laugh> not roll off

James Thomson (01:25:04):
The I've that currently Yeah. In, in the current version, you can roll dice on your table and they will fall off onto the floor

Andy Ihnatko (01:25:10):
<Laugh>. And do they keep rolling when they hit the floor?

James Thomson (01:25:12):
They, they do. Because when, when you're even, even on the iPhone, when it's got the the I, well, what do you call it? The, the depth ca the depth indicator stuff lidar, yes, with the lidar, it's, it's scanning the room and it's building a 3D model of the surfaces that it sees. So, so long as it's seen it if you roll the dice, it will fall off your table naturally and will roll under a, under a chair. And there is like even just doing that through a phone or iPad screen, which is not the way to do ar There is something magical about having a dice roll out roll under a table <laugh>. Cause

Andy Ihnatko (01:25:52):
It should, that's what DICE does. Yeah. And then, and then just like, just like every other, like family board game or family game system, like after you've had this app for, for like six months, like nominally, like one of the dice says rolling, like under the, under the sofa, but no one saw it. So they have to get like another dye from another game that doesn't quite match the other set.

James Thomson (01:26:13):
May maybe I, I sell them another dice for like 99 cents to replace the one that used another sofa. I mean,

Leo Laporte (01:26:20):
So many opportunities. You gotta,

Andy Ihnatko (01:26:22):
You, you gotta pay for that. You gotta pay for that vision somehow.

Leo Laporte (01:26:25):
Oh gosh. I honestly,

James Thomson (01:26:29):
I need to sell three and a half thousand dice immediately.

Leo Laporte (01:26:31):
<Laugh>. I, I do think tabletop games might end up being a big category for the vision Pro. I

James Thomson (01:26:38):
Mean, I can, I can see the stuff with, you know, like the, the virtual tabletop in front of you Yeah. Where you've got, you know, your, your, your little figures or whatever, it makes sense and if you can do it. But the thought of like, trying to get together, you know, half a dozen people all who have three and a half thousand pound headsets Yes. Oh yeah. To play d and d Oh, yeah. In the same room as you, or, or whatever. It's,

Leo Laporte (01:27:02):
I think there's a, I think there's a lot of people that, that will buy

Andy Ihnatko (01:27:05):
The headset that might have played d and d

Leo Laporte (01:27:07):
In the past. <Laugh>. I, I think it

James Thomson (01:27:08):
Might be,

Leo Laporte (01:27:09):
There's a heavy crossover. It's a Venn diagram with a very large wedge in the middle. I think it's Steve Wozniak who had a League of Segway polo players. And the Segway was twice as much at the time. So I could, I think it, you know, it'll be a, it'll be a thin layer of people, but there will be some who would like to play tabletop games. It probably isn't a moneymaker. I

Andy Ihnatko (01:27:32):
Mean, if, if you could, if you can, if you can find a way to sell people like unpainted mini figs and then sell them the virtual paint for that, I know a lot of people that,

Leo Laporte (01:27:41):
Oh, that's a good idea.

Andy Ihnatko (01:27:42):
Could have a second house right now if not for all the lead they've got in closets. That's

Leo Laporte (01:27:45):
A good idea.

James Thomson (01:27:46):
There is genuinely, I have seen a game which does exactly that, but you are buying like figures and painting them and playing the game in virtually

Leo Laporte (01:27:56):
In the long run. That's gonna be the bane of 3D environments, just as it was the bane for of Second Life, which is when it suddenly becomes an economy and you've got, you know, bucks and you're, and you're spending Zuck bucks for designs

James Thomson (01:28:12):
And stuff. I, I mean, I trust Apple. Well, I trust Apple to more extent than I trust, you know, like Netflix Absolutely.

Leo Laporte (01:28:19):
Or somebody

James Thomson (01:28:19):
Else to

Leo Laporte (01:28:20):
Do this sort

James Thomson (01:28:20):
Of stuff. Yeah. I mean, it is gonna be, you know, you are gonna get the equivalent of the f you know, free in quotes, games that you download that you have to buy your gems or your diamonds or your whatever. And that's, you know, because

Leo Laporte (01:28:37):
That's where the money is.

James Thomson (01:28:38):
Well, it's also that the, the, the whole app store economy is just a weird thing, you know? And like, actually making money is a difficult it, it's, I wouldn't say it's easy, but it's easier if you've been around for 30 years and people know your name and your products. But coming to stuff, you know, if you've got an app that you're launching and you're trying to get it in front of people, that's a really hard thing to do. And, and then make money outta it.

Leo Laporte (01:29:09):
I do have my miniature Leo LaPorte for hero Forge all ready for our game. So when you when you, when, and, and this comes pre-painted, I gotta tell you, but if you wanted to change the colors, you could do that. I

James Thomson (01:29:25):
Don't know. I, I like the fact that it comes with a, a, an iPhone,

Leo Laporte (01:29:28):
A microphone, and an older iPhone. Cuz I think this is an old Did you do this Patrick, who did this? This is very nice. Got the fz. I'm sitting on an exercise ball. Patrick did it. Very nice. <Laugh>. let's see, how about Sonoma? Anything? You know, I wasn't completely clear. Are the widgets on Sonoma the same as the widgets on iPad As Yes. As on iOS? Yes. Those are all the same.

James Thomson (01:29:53):
Yeah. And, and like even today with the, like with Dice's Widgets, because it's, it's a Catalyst app, but it's literally, it's the same code running. So yeah. It's, it's swifty y everywhere. It's all very similar. Good. and yeah, you can, you can put the widgets on the desktop and

Leo Laporte (01:30:10):
I know I really like that move

James Thomson (01:30:11):
Around the icons.

Leo Laporte (01:30:12):
I really like that. That's something other operating systems have had for some time. I've used Conky on Linux, windows flirted with it under <laugh>, and then decided this is too much of a hazard. I could, I could see them bringing it back though that now that Apple's doing it. So I'm, I look forward to that. I think that's gonna be a nice feature. Yeah,

James Thomson (01:30:32):
I mean, I, there was a few little things that I really liked, like the being able to turn webpages into standalone web apps. How

Leo Laporte (01:30:40):
Close is that to the full pwa or is that just Apple's version of No, this

James Thomson (01:30:44):
Is just, I think this is just basically it, it's just wrapping a safari window into an app that, you know, you can layer layer amongst other apps and it's got an app in the doc and things like that. It's, it, it, it's the, it seems like the ideal kind of thing that you can like constrain Facebook or something like that into, so it, it's kept securely away from everything else. And, and I think that, like, I was looking at the, the list of things, you know, there's nothing that's like amazing. I mean, like the, the game mode stuff and the, you know, the, the more interesting commitment to doing game stuff. I find that interesting.

Leo Laporte (01:31:34):
Well, I was I think we've been talking about it. We're very pleased to see Apple wrote a fairly long 20,000, according to Christina Warren, who wrote an article about it, 20,000 line addition to the crossover line library for Mac that allows you to run DirectX 12 games at a fairly good pace on the new Apple silicon laptops. Yeah.

James Thomson (01:31:59):
I, I would say the, the, the, the caveat with that is I don't think Apple intends anyone to ship games like this, you know?

Leo Laporte (01:32:10):
No, this is, no, they say it's to test your game to see if you could port it to metal. But you gotta think, think they're gonna be people who are gonna say, fine, I'll just take it the way it is. Thank you very much, <laugh>.

James Thomson (01:32:21):
I, I don't, I don't think it's for that. I, I don't even know if I would let you do that, but I think it, like any, I I know people who work for MAC game porting things, and a lot of them have internal libraries to do this kind of thing, right. Already to Right. To convert the direct text calls. And I'm not a hundred percent sure, and I ha I would need to look this up, whether Apple contributed the, the changes that they made to this back to the open source project or whether they, you know, like are keeping them to themselves. I certainly heard some people complaining that they weren't sharing what they had done. So I, I can't speak with authority to whether they did or not, but it, it, it's interesting, but I think it is more a case of like, here, here's your game running. Like imagine how much better it would be if you actually spent some time and, and you started this, the metal. Right. But, you know, just the fact that people have run, you know, fairly modern games.

Leo Laporte (01:33:24):
Here's Diablo form running on a MacBook at pretty decent frame rate. I think it's this is around 60 frames a second right now. You can see the frame right up in the upper right hand corner using this crossover or wine library. That's pretty playable. This is an, an ultra level too. Ultra ultra graphics.

James Thomson (01:33:47):
I, it's, it's good stuff. And it's interesting. It does show what the performance is. And I like the fact that Apple is kind of leaning into games a bit more because certainly they've had a reputation for like, let's say the last 30 years of not being great with games. But, you know, even the, the stuff that they showed, you know, like they had Death Stranding, which is a, you know, right. I don't dunno. Two, three year old game. Yeah. Kojima and no Man Sky and I love No Man Sky. It's a great game, but it's been out for years. Right. You

Leo Laporte (01:34:27):
Know, I

James Thomson (01:34:28):
Right it, this is

Leo Laporte (01:34:31):
No one buys a Mac to play AA games. You'd be silly. Yeah. I mean, I mean, that's not, I

James Thomson (01:34:35):
Think like honestly, I've been running a Mac and a separate games console to play games on Yeah. For Yes. Literally 30 years. Yeah. Get

Leo Laporte (01:34:43):
An Xbox if you, or a PlayStation if you really wanna do that. Yeah.

James Thomson (01:34:47):
I mean, it's like, I, you know, Microsoft used to be the enemy, I have to say, but the Xbox and Game Pass is pretty sweet.

Leo Laporte (01:34:53):
It's a good deal. What do you, what game do you play these days?

James Thomson (01:34:58):
What game am I playing these days? I have put 150 hours into the new Zelda game, and I'm probably about halfway through it,

Leo Laporte (01:35:05):
Tears of the Kingdom baby. We now know who shed those tears, <laugh> all the lone and

James Thomson (01:35:12):
Well, no, because MySpace is playing with you, like 90 hours session. Nice. No, she's like, we've got one Switch and you know, one TV dear. So we have to like, have to

Leo Laporte (01:35:22):
Fight over. We have to share. Oh, it's, well,

James Thomson (01:35:24):
It's not fighting. It's like now it's your turn. Now it's

Leo Laporte (01:35:26):
My time. Your turn dear.

James Thomson (01:35:27):
But, but so it's, you know, I think everyone, everyone plays games now. It's not just men, so. Oh yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:35:36):
Absolutely. Everybody plays games. You bet. The,

James Thomson (01:35:38):
The

Leo Laporte (01:35:40):
Of, of some sort, I would

James Thomson (01:35:41):
Say, I would say Tears of the Kingdom is probably up there for one of the best games ever made. Right. It is so good. And yeah, that, that is what, that is what is taking a lot of my time. I hope to try and finish it before ww d c and I failed <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:36:02):
Well, you're just a punter. You haven't put anywhere near the number of hours in that it's gonna take. Yeah, yeah. Here, by the way, full credit to Antico, because he used Hero Forge, which was one of your picks of the week to do, to do a 3d. Jim Dow Rimple <laugh>. Wow. <laugh> beer bottles and guitar included <laugh>. I,

James Thomson (01:36:21):
I'm not sure there's enough beer bottles there in that one, but,

Leo Laporte (01:36:24):
Well, it was early. It was early in the day. But the beard is definitely on point. Very much feared the beard. Yeah, I forgot about

Andy Ihnatko (01:36:33):
That Amy. Scary how many, how, how many accessories you can add <laugh>. You gotta, you gotta imagine that every time the someone gets someone emails or has feedback saying, Hey I really, really wanted to have like a Devo hat on my character. Okay. Okay. Easy. We, we added a Evo hat <laugh>, it's just a

James Thomson (01:36:52):
Planner. I, I I, I do find that hero forge, like even if I haven't actually had anything made yet. Yes. It, it is really entertaining just to sit there and, and make these things

Leo Laporte (01:37:02):
<Laugh>. Oh, well we have a fellow hero forger.

Andy Ihnatko (01:37:06):
It'd be, wouldn't it be great if that, that would be wonderful VR app. Like if, just the idea of I just want to create figures and I don't, I don't wanna know how to sculpt. I don't necessarily wanna know how to, how to paint. Just show me like sample, sample poses that level that I can start with access accessories and paints that the colors I can add to it and just have this object on a shelf in, in, in VR that I can just admire and just keep, keep adding like a, like a collection of thimbles or spoons, <laugh>. That would be, I mean, that would be super fun. I,

James Thomson (01:37:36):
I think technically, you know, like they could have a website with 3D content in it and you know, you could just go to their website and click

Leo Laporte (01:37:45):
Microsoft did that when for briefly Microsoft Show 3D View, it's got into this. Yeah. I wonder if you can export these hero forges as U S D Z and U S D Z format, or No, probably not. Huh?

James Thomson (01:37:57):
They probably don't want to give you that because they don't want you just taking them away and printing them yourself. Right. But right. But yeah, I, I could see Yeah, exactly. That kind of stuff working really well in, in 3d sitting with a, a giant figurine of Jim Dell Rempel in front of you,

Leo Laporte (01:38:15):
<Laugh> glaring at you saying,

James Thomson (01:38:17):
Come on, come on. We got,

Leo Laporte (01:38:18):
We got a post. We got a post. Since we talked last, didn't Alex you would know who released an iOS app. Was it that lets you do, because I had, cuz Anthony came in and scammed

Alex Lindsay (01:38:32):
Me for, for game characters or Oh no, for iOS? No, there's Poly Cam The, no, that's the new one

Leo Laporte (01:38:37):
That just came out like human cam or Humanity. Oh, I can't remember what it was.

Alex Lindsay (01:38:43):
Well, there's, you know, and and the one that's starting to come up now is Metahuman

Leo Laporte (01:38:47):
Metahuman. That was it.

Alex Lindsay (01:38:49):
Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:38:50):
Who's that from?

Alex Lindsay (01:38:51):
That's from Epic.

Leo Laporte (01:38:53):
So that's in the Unreal Engine, which means

Alex Lindsay (01:38:55):
It's not gonna be helpful. It's, it's, well, it, it, it, it's, it's, it's in Unreal. I mean it's, it's the same company, but Metahuman kind of lives in its own world. I'm sure it's using part of the engine, but but Metahuman is pretty impressive on a whole bunch of LA layers For a long time. We could only make things that look like, kind of like somebody, cuz you'd pull dials. Now we can do photogrammetry and actually get ahead and replace the head in Metahuman and have it all map. And the big thing there is that you can, you know, animate it with your phone and stuff like that. So it's, it's kind of, it's, it's slick. I mean, epic Epic's doing a lot of great stuff. They're going to be most likely on the outside looking in. I don't think that they're, I don't, I don't think that Apple and Epic are talking <laugh>. I, I mean terms. And so that puts them at a huge disadvantage to Unity. Because because Unity I think is, I mean obviously they were in wwc, so there's a lot of embrace Apple's embracing a lot of what Unity's doing. And I don't, again, I don't think that Epic and Apple are are in on speaking terms.

James Thomson (01:39:50):
So, but you, you can still build the latest, you know, unreal five point whatever on the Mac. You know, it, it works,

Alex Lindsay (01:39:57):
It can, but if you don't have access, if you don't have Unity's access to, yeah,

James Thomson (01:40:01):
Its like, I, it, it, it seems like that is just gonna be a political thing. But I think the people doing the technology, you know, as we say, like this thing for metahuman for doing the facial animation and stuff running on an iPhone. So it's not like the, it's not like Epic is saying we shall never touch another. No, no,

Alex Lindsay (01:40:24):
I don't think, I don't think, I don't think Epic wants to do that. And I definitely don't think the Unreal folks wanna do it. I think that, yeah, they're just not gonna get a lot of Apple's attention. You know, there's it, it's not that your Apple's doing anything to them. I just think that Apple's not gonna step, Apple's probably not going to step out of its way to help Epic at this point until they drop their lawsuits. So, so I think that's gonna probably be the, probably how that's gonna work. So it'll be interesting to see. I mean, unity fills a big gap and, and is what Epic was filling until Epic did the lawsuit. Unity is filling a big gap for Apple. Cause they can't, they, they can't build all those tools immediately.

Leo Laporte (01:40:56):
So to fill in the gaps here, apparently you can export into STL for five bucks from Hero Forge and you can download into Unity 3D format. So that's interesting. So Hero Forge could be used to design.

James Thomson (01:41:10):
So what I'm hearing is we're gonna make a game with Jim Dow,

Leo Laporte (01:41:14):
Rimple <laugh>. I think we are gonna have a Jim Dow Rimple Tabletop game Beer. Beer <laugh>. I'd like him in a chess set actually. That'd be a lot of fun.

James Thomson (01:41:25):
Beards and bottles or something.

Leo Laporte (01:41:27):
<Laugh>. Yeah, the blondes are beer bottles. And Jim's the king, obviously. Maybe we'll make I don't know who should be the Queen. But that would be kind of fun. And Anthony tells me he was using reality Scan to capture me, and then he's gonna rebuild it within Metahuman to create a metahuman Leo. So you can now, I guess, do photogrammetry with real

Alex Lindsay (01:41:51):
People in reality Scan. It's also owned by epic. I bet Epic.

Leo Laporte (01:41:54):
Okay. Yeah. Alex, what do you, what do you think of the idea of Apple buying? Unreal. It's expensive. Seems,

Alex Lindsay (01:42:02):
Yeah, it's just, it's the, because it's not buying Unreal, it's buying Epic and Epic

Leo Laporte (01:42:07):
Epic's worth a lot of money right now. This thing called Fortnite. You ever hear of it?

Alex Lindsay (01:42:11):
I mean, the problem with both Unity and Epic, they weren't worth a lot you know, five or, or eight years ago, but now they're both in the plus 15 billion valuation range. It's not that Apple can't afford it, it would just be a huge you know, I mean, I, I think that and I, I think that, so, and it would be hard for them to, I think, incorporate those two things together. But I, yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:42:32):
So I think that Tim Sweeney made in the first year of Fortnite himself earned 7 billion <laugh>. So it's gonna be costly, I think.

Alex Lindsay (01:42:42):
Yeah. And, and the thing is, is that, is that the you know, unreal engine is, is, you know, obviously very connected to what, you know, epic wants to do, which is the whole lawsuit is over. You know, they want to build marketplaces, they want people to do exactly what we were talking about earlier, which is sell items to each other in, in a, in a metaverse and you know, sell houses and cars and all kinds of other things. But they don't want to give Apple 30% of every sale. So that's the, so that their entire business model is wrapped

Leo Laporte (01:43:10):
Up. I mean, apple could afford it. They've got the cash, you know, and the line around,

Alex Lindsay (01:43:15):
Oh no, they could, it just

Leo Laporte (01:43:16):
Yeah. Is a sale. Right.

James Thomson (01:43:19):
Tim Sweeney probably would not sell on point of principle.

Leo Laporte (01:43:22):
Well, exactly. This is the company that fought each other viciously in court. It still is, as far as I know. The, the battle continues. Epic. games net worth 32 billion according to the last valuation in April of last year. Apple could afford 32 billion. Come on Apple. But yeah, you gotta, you'd have to do a hostile takeover, right? Are they? I don't even know if they're public, to be honest. Anyway, that's a silly time. We've got, we've got Paul McCartney here. Let's ask some <laugh>. Let's ask some important questions. You guys, anything a Alex, are you actively looking at developing for the Vision Pro?

Alex Lindsay (01:44:06):
Oh, yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:44:06):
Yeah.

Alex Lindsay (01:44:07):
Okay. <Laugh>, I'm already, I'm already enough said already in pre-production. Yeah. So, yeah, so we're, I mean, mostly we're looking at you know, I'm mostly looking at video, the video end of things. So you know how to deliver. Right now it looks like we're still gonna be kind of clamped the, and when we say that Apple didn't cut any corner, I mean, didn't, you know, wasn't constrained by price, I think they were constrained by either weight or heat or something. Because most of us think that the naturally eventually want to get to 120 frames per second, six or eight K per eye. And they're

Leo Laporte (01:44:37):
At 90. Now this, this

Alex Lindsay (01:44:38):
First headset and 90 is kind of a weird, from a video perspective, it's a weird frame rate because now it does 96 for 24 frames. So if you're playing a movie, it'll do 96 so that it can give you whole frames. Right. You know, it doesn't cut those frames off. So, so it's four x, the 24, the so that's there what's, but otherwise everything's 90 frame, 90 frame makes a big difference for 3D when it's animating in front of you. But we can't produce video at 90 frames a second, right? So we could produce it at one 20, it

Leo Laporte (01:45:05):
Screen 60, what's it 4K screen.

Alex Lindsay (01:45:08):
They've been a little squirrelly about the exact <laugh>, exact resolution, but it does appear to be force some kind of four some version of 4k or close to it. So, yeah. So it's, it's, it's going well. You

Leo Laporte (01:45:20):
Can watch you movies in it. So it has to be some way, reasonable way to control it. Not

Alex Lindsay (01:45:25):
Only, not only can you watch movies, you can watch them in 3D and, and it's going to be a Yeah. A great platform for 3D that. Right,

Leo Laporte (01:45:33):
Right. They demoed avatar the way of, well, the

Alex Lindsay (01:45:36):
Wawa and Avatar's a good example. Avatar's a 48 frame per second film. Right. You know, so they, you know, they talk about being 48 underwater in 24. It's 48, and then they just double the frames when they're above, above the water. And then they go back to single frames hysteric eight. And so, and so the but it's a 48 frame, which is, you can't play that back in a lot of places. I mean, you know, your average TVs don't know what to do with that and so on. So the headset's actually gonna be really great for watching things like Avatar. And I think that you're gonna it's going to bring back, there's a whole bunch of us now that are suddenly trying to find all those 3D rigs. You know, I was just talking to someone who has a whole bunch of rigs and he is like, yeah, I can't sell these ones anymore cuz they're under, they're under demand and I gotta use 'em for production and I can sell these ones. Oh, you

Leo Laporte (01:46:19):
Must have some of those shelves behind you there.

Alex Lindsay (01:46:22):
I don't have, I I I have one, you know this one right here? That Osmo Right. That's a 360. That's a the OZO. Ozo. Yeah. And so the but it's not gonna be the, the quality that we would want to, you know, shoot for these now. So, so a lot of us are looking at things like the R five C, which is the cannon Cannon's R five C with a, they have a stereo lens on it. Yeah, I've seen it. Yeah. So you dual 180, but that would be feeding the spaces. So you'd feed that into a space rather than the vol the volume or window environment. But really when you're watching movies, you probably watch it in the window environment. And the advantage of that is that you can shoot rectilinear video. So we can, if we fill the video fill, fill the video frame, we can go ahead and shoot tr quote unquote traditional 3d, not 180. And and so then, but the problem there is that when you start doing that, we have all kinds of problems like convergence and where those cameras are, and those, those become these really complicated, you know, rigs. And so that's what we're, we're all trying to find who has rigs that are still sitting. There's two of 'em in our building, so we're trying to get them to rebuild them again. Cause

Leo Laporte (01:47:26):
They used to be, that used to be the next big thing, and then it wasn't million. Yeah. So there's all these million

Alex Lindsay (01:47:30):
Now it is millions and millions and millions of dollars were spent on these rigs. I mean, these rigs, like, you can get a rig now that's like, it was $60,000 or $70,000, you can buy 'em now for about 10. And there's a bunch of people that are in good discussions about buying those at 10. Wow. and and, and I, and if you email me afterwards and say, who's, who's selling these for 10? I can't tell you cause I'm trying to buy. Yeah, yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:47:51):
No. So anyway. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Alex Lindsay (01:47:53):
Yeah. So, so the but, but those are, you know, it's suddenly everybody's interested in 3D again because these will be incredible headsets for it. And the big thing is, is that when someone spends $3,500 on a, on a headset, they're likely to buy a lot of things that get made for it. So if you're, you know, there's this kind of the, the, in the first couple months that these headsets go out and really the first year there's gonna be a lot of demand for the next new thing in, you know, I mean, you can definitely move all your apps to it, but something that fully takes advantage of the headset should be pretty interesting. Well,

James Thomson (01:48:23):
You're gonna, one of the questions that, go ahead. I was just gonna say, one of the questions that I had about the headset, which I haven't really seen answered, is so you can record, like when you, you've got the thing on, you can record what you're seeing. Yeah. And then later playback that stuff in a, in a window

Alex Lindsay (01:48:40):
It's, or send it to somebody else to watch it as well. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:48:43):
But they have to have a vision pro to get the full stereoscopic version.

James Thomson (01:48:47):
Yes. But it, it's, it's more the kind of like they seem to be moving, they seem to be positioning it as you are watching. You are watch this memory back in a window. Yeah. Rather than experiencing it full.

Leo Laporte (01:49:01):
Oh, that's interesting.

James Thomson (01:49:02):
As you,

Alex Lindsay (01:49:02):
As you Yeah. I don't, I don't, yeah. Cuz that's, that's a, it's a mu from a resolution perspective, it's much more complicated. And so I think that those cameras may not be able to, I mean, you, the, the cameras that need to do that may not be able to do the, the 180 at a, at a resolution that would be, that would be qu high enough quality that would make it worth it. So I think that that's probably why they're not a, a small fisheye spread spreading all of that 180 degrees out over 4k, let's say, if it's capturing 4K wouldn't necessarily, it would probably look a little soft <laugh>. Yeah. So by, by, by pulling it in, they can get a higher quality for that, that window. And I'm, I'm gonna guess that that's what they're going to do. And it's funny, you know, a lot of people talk about that, but people aren't gonna put the headsets on. But I mean, when I grew up, people were putting big cameras, they had big camcorders and everything else. This is just the next camcorder. The and but the other thing is, I, I, I imagine

Leo Laporte (01:49:51):
Version two will have better recording. I mean, that would really be an important feature. Yeah. That would sell a lot of headsets too. If you could only

Andy Ihnatko (01:49:58):
Watch, watch headset was, it was hands-on one of my favorite features of Google Glass, just being able to a hundred percent probably. Yeah. I'm hundred percentm. I just, if if something cool's happening, just tap the side of the, of the, of the, of the frames and now suddenly I'm watching it, but also recording it. Okay. Take

Alex Lindsay (01:50:11):
A, yeah, okay. Take a video. And I had, I have, I have shots of video of me, like swinging my daughter in a circle around in a park. Oh, you know, with, and, and when she's really small, which is much more valuable now. But it was from that point of view. Yeah. Now it was less it would be less weird with the Google glass of all things than it would be to do that with Myles. But, but the but I also, I'm just gonna be blown away that by this iPhone 16, we don't have a camera set up in the iPhones that we'll shoot stereo for the headsets. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, I, I, I think there's a 50 to 60% chance we'll see it in this camera that comes into the next one. Given that they knew that this headset was coming. And I think it's probably 80% by the next year that we'll see the ability to do stereo acquisition in the camera, in the iPhones. Okay. Cause it wouldn't take very much to do it.

James Thomson (01:50:59):
I could see them do an extra high-end phone, you know, like

Alex Lindsay (01:51:03):
It would, it would be the pro, I I think it would be the pro, the pro would, I,

James Thomson (01:51:06):
I think probably one above the pro, I think they would probably put that on, on something.

Alex Lindsay (01:51:11):
I mean, literally it would be adding one more lens. Like it'd be a quad instead of a, instead of a thing. And you could, that's all you, cuz you would have two lenses that are matching. You don't have to spread it out. Because if you look at the hydrogen that, that red made those lenses were, those sensors were right next to each other, which is not interocular distance, but still mm-hmm. <Affirmative> got enough data with, with computational photography to it looked pretty good. I mean, the red stuff looked pretty stereo even with sensors that were a centimeter apart. So these, the ones that on the phone would be two or three times as far apart as the red camera. So you could definitely generate 3D data relatively, especially with help from the LIDAR and everything else. You'd probably able to create some pretty great 3D data, but, and you could do it potentially with just computational photography right now, with the current lenses that are there. I would worry that it just wouldn't look right. You know, like you'd want two lenses that are identical. But, but you know, Apple's got lots of engineers thinking about that, I'm sure. Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko (01:52:10):
To, to me it depends on how much more expensive would that second lens be or that additional lens be. And would the, is there enough elasticity in what people are willing to spend for the pro model to say, Hey, I don't care. I I don't own these goggles. I don't care about these goggles. I don't want these goggles. What I, what I would much rather be able to do is afford another 256 gigabytes of of storage. But no, I'm being forced to pay for this extra lens that I don't know if I'm gonna actually use or not. I don't, that's that's, that's my signal point.

James Thomson (01:52:36):
But then you can have, you know, you've got this 3D movie of your daughter's Yeah. Fifth birthday party and you can, I don know

Andy Ihnatko (01:52:43):
People who,

Alex Lindsay (01:52:44):
I don't know, people that are buying the pro version, that those people that I know that are buying the pro version are not super connected to the price. You know, like, like they, and, and, and I don't think that they're, I don't think that's, that, that's, that's why you buy the pro version. And so I think that I think that they'd probably sell just as I, I don't think they'd sell any less e even if it was $200 more, I don't think it would matter.

Andy Ihnatko (01:53:03):
Okay.

Alex Lindsay (01:53:04):
As someone who buys the perversion. Like, like I, if it was $200 more, I'd be like, oh, there'd be something else I can't buy. It wouldn't be less memory or, or less of the camera. It'd be something else in my life that I don't buy because I, cause I want, I want a little more camera.

James Thomson (01:53:16):
You, your, your, your child doesn't get the birthday present, but you, I'm sorry, I'm,

Leo Laporte (01:53:22):
You're not gonna get a cell phone become and he spent all the money on this honey and

Andy Ihnatko (01:53:27):
Oh, that, that is, that is a wonderfully weird family dynamic. Say kid, here's, here's, here's, here's the deal, here's the choice I'm offering you. I'll can either give you a Nintendo switch for your, a new Nintendo switch for your birthday, or I can buy a $400 better than phone, which will make me want to spend more time with you, cuz I'll be wanting to take more video of you, <laugh>.

Alex Lindsay (01:53:49):
That's funny.

Leo Laporte (01:53:50):
My kids hated it when I took pictures and video of them. And all I have now is a bunch of pictures with their hands in front of their face. Like, like they like paparazzi.

Alex Lindsay (01:53:58):
You know, it's so funny. We hated it when my dad took it, but we, we prized those. Oh, you're

Leo Laporte (01:54:02):
Glad to have him now. Absolutely. In fact, they, I just sent Abby a bunch of pictures from the, she said, do you have any pictures of us when we were kids? I said, Abby, I do, but your hands in front of your face for 90% of them.

James Thomson (01:54:15):
I mean, there's so few pictures of me as like a teenager because I'm like completely averse to any absolutely anything. And I was, but now I want those pictures. Sure.

Leo Laporte (01:54:25):
So

Andy Ihnatko (01:54:25):
Yeah. I, I was thinking about that the other day that like, when my when my parents died, that was the first time that a, their, they, all of their friends like dug up the, these super rare pictures though, here, here is my mom as a teenager just hanging out here is my dad going skiing. Which I had never even, like, never the, he didn't have a copy of it and I didn't ask about it. It's such an amazing thing when you see your parents in their twenties and in their teens just hanging out. It's gonna be amazing. Like 20 years from now when the pe the, the TikTok kids and the Instagram kids and the Visco kids, all of their children are gonna be able to see to their <laugh> to their embarrassment. Like, here is, here is my, here is my parents like me going out there having fun, occasionally doing things that are stupid. But hey, look, they, they, they raised two kids and they're happy with their lives. Even their, they 30 years later. I, that's gonna be an interesting pivot point for society. I think.

Leo Laporte (01:55:17):
Couple other stories before we get our picks of the week and wrap this thing up. Apple is facing some headwinds. Japan has, is now pushing for both Apple and Google to add side loading in the Japanese versions of the app stores. This is a new Japanese law. Apple's gonna have to do it this summer, probably in the EU as or next summer in the EU as well. So you know, it's gonna be, it's gonna be kind of this patchwork quilt of, of app stores in different countries. Probably not here, although who knows what the FTC will do. The EU says all smartphones must have user replaceable batteries by 2027.

Andy Ihnatko (01:56:02):
Yeah. But they, but they're not talking necessarily. Talking about like having the back removable in a, in a cartridge. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:56:07):
Those were the good old days, man. I love, they're, they're basically, I loved it when I could buy three batteries for my Samsung S3 and yeah. But, but now,

Andy Ihnatko (01:56:17):
But now we have, we have batteries that because of greater battery management and chemistry that they, well they, they last a couple of days, so now it's not quite, you don't have to worry about getting it through a day. There. There's, there's been a lot of pearl clutching about this one. This, the, the proposal again, doesn't say that you can't have waterproof phones anymore. You have to, you know, have externally pop off. They're basically saying that do not be jerks and do anything, the design that would make it, that would prohibit someone from opening the back and removing a, removing a battery and putting a new battery in. So it's, it seems, and also it's notable that they're not putting this, they're not making this happen until 2027, which is like four years from now, which is almost exactly the cycle of design for a brand new model of phone. It's

Leo Laporte (01:56:56):
Likely that Apple, in other words, will just make it that you can, you know, take it to the Apple store and open it up. I mean, you can do that now. Right.

Andy Ihnatko (01:57:04):
It's, it's gonna, it's gonna be a third party. I think they're, I think that the, the days where you're gonna have to rent a special tool from Apple to replace a battery, that's the sort of stuff that they want to get rid of.

Leo Laporte (01:57:14):
Right. Speaking, I

Andy Ihnatko (01:57:15):
Think go ahead and I fix a kit. I think we'll do it

Alex Lindsay (01:57:17):
Ahead. I think it's a recommendation two. I don't think it's finalized yet. Oh, okay. Probably, sorry. Probably a little bit of, a little bit of headwinds on on what exactly what year that might, that might occur and whether phones will even be a thing by the time they, who knows?

Leo Laporte (01:57:29):
You'll have to be able to open your vision pro. Oh no, there's no boundary. Easily <laugh>. There's a battery

Alex Lindsay (01:57:34):
Outside. Outside's an outside. It's the vision pro for battery because it's not even in the thing. Yeah. The the we have to remember that U s BBC took 12, 12 years. Yeah. I think was was,

Leo Laporte (01:57:44):
That's the problem with it, is by the time it happens, who knows what the standards will be. Yeah. I think we're still gonna need batteries in the future. I guess those aren't going away. Okay. apple has expanded its self-service repair program to include the iPhone 14 lineup and M two Mac MacBooks that'll start June 21st. And maybe even more importantly, they're changing that final system configuration validation step, which used to involve calling Apple on the phone. You'll be able to do that system configuration, that validation step by placing your device into diagnostics mode and following on screen prompts.

Andy Ihnatko (01:58:23):
So yeah. Isn't that good to see that this wasn't just phony baloney. We wanna get around Yeah, we wanna get around complaints. It really does seem like they're committed to this and now I'm really, now I am willing to believe that this is part of what goes into design. That they make sure that this, that whatever they design in the future will be able to conform to this, this

Leo Laporte (01:58:40):
This program still have to order the kit, a rental kit of very, very elaborate tools. I wonder if this would satisfy the eu, you know. Well, yeah. You can put a new battery in if you have our super-duper scooper. Alright. First is your, is your home or apartment rated for 250 volts? 40 x? Yeah, exactly. Because Exactly. Let us take a little break. I think we could do some picks of the week coming up in just a bit. James Thompson, our very special guest from pcal and anco, Alex Lindsay, and our show today brought to you by Zocdoc. See now we don't have the National Health Service here in the, the United States. We actually have to find our physicians on our own. Zocdoc though, really solves this problem. And what I love most about zocdoc is you, it's a free app. Iphone, Android. You can go onto the website and get get, get the link by going to zoc doc.com/mac break.

(01:59:45):
But you can actually narrow down the search by insurance so you can make sure you're going to a doctor that takes your insurance by whether they're available. You know, when they have room. Some, a lot of times these days in the US you get a doctor and they say, well, I'm not taking on new patients. Well, that's no good. Well, Zoc doc will find the doctor that is, and it's not just doctors, it's physicians, dentists, chiropractors, and every specialty. I mentioned this before. I was looking for a gerontologist for my older parent, and I was able to narrow one down in the, in the area. Who takes her insurance? Who's available? This is fantastic. Oh, I left out the most important part. User reviews, verified reviews of the doctor. So you're gonna find a doctor that fits your needs. This is important.

(02:00:34):
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James Thomson (02:02:00):
Yes. So this is something that I've been playing with it's a little esoteric, but this is the MR. F P G A <laugh> and it's an, it's an open source hardware and software project to recreate classic consoles, computers, and arcade systems via an F P G A processor, which is basically reprogrammable hardware that can become other chips. So the idea is you download the design of a chip like a motor of 68,000 to the the F P G A and then it effectively becomes that processor in theory means that you get a more accurate recreation of the thing that you're trying to simulate. It's slightly more complicated in practice than what is emulation versus simulation. But anyway, that's the basic idea. So this thing can become like a classic Mac a Commodore 64, a Super Nintendo, pretty much anything from the, from pong to the PlayStation. And you get this like development board and then there's, which looks

Leo Laporte (02:03:01):
A little bit like a raspberry pie.

James Thomson (02:03:03):
Yeah, it's, it's, it's exactly the size of a raspberry pie. Yeah. And then you get these additional boards which stack on top. So that one in the picture there was showing it's got a V G A port on the top. Oh,

Leo Laporte (02:03:16):
Wow. And you can have,

James Thomson (02:03:17):
Have inputs for putting like classic controllers and, and analog stuff or whatever you want. And, and it's really fun. And you know, it's, it can basically do, you know, like as I say, pong to PlayStation. So you're talking at least 20 years worth of computers and things really nicely. And there I keep, cause it's an open source project, lots of people working on it and, and there's new stuff coming out all the time. You know, software emulating stuff running. So it's

Leo Laporte (02:03:52):
Not an FPGA on the board. It's actually an arm processor. It's, oh, there is an fpga,

James Thomson (02:03:57):
It's an fpg. Okay. There's an FPGA and an arm sort of like sidekick, which can run some of the stuff, but most of the actual work is done on the F P G A.

Leo Laporte (02:04:07):
You're not reprogramming it or are you?

James Thomson (02:04:10):
Yes, you are. Oh, wow. You send, you send it. The thing saying here is the circuit diagram and the, the what the chip looks like, and it, it becomes that. So it it, it's like a transformer, you know, you, you can, can

Leo Laporte (02:04:26):
Make it. That's so cool. Yeah.

James Thomson (02:04:28):
It, it's, I think it's the same technology Apple used in the Afterburner card on the, the MAC Pro. I think it used an F P G A on that. And it's really just a way of like creating hardware using software.

Andy Ihnatko (02:04:44):
Yeah. I've been really, I've, I've been really interested in this since I started hearing, hearing about these a couple years ago. Like how, how difficult is it to flash like a different CPU and different electronics on it? Like, can you once, if once you set it up as a Mac, is it enough trouble to flash it into like a, a 3 86 set? You, you, you think twice before doing it? Or?

James Thomson (02:05:02):
No, it's not difficult at all. It's like you push a button, you go up to a menu and you say, now you're this. Oh

Leo Laporte (02:05:07):
My God.

James Thomson (02:05:08):
It, it's really simple and it's gotta the, I think the, the UI of it runs on the arm processor and it's got like Linux on it. But then you, you pick the core that you want and then you can like hook up discs or cartridges to it. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:05:25):
Is there a limit to the number of times you can reprogram it or does it wear, wear out?

James Thomson (02:05:29):
I don't think so. I don't, I I don't think it's

Leo Laporte (02:05:32):
That's so cool. And,

James Thomson (02:05:34):
And it, it's it's really a nice little project because it's, you know, it's like one of the first kind of open source hardware things that I've seen of like people just building these additional boards and then any putting out the designs and then anyone can build the boards and seldom, and

Leo Laporte (02:05:52):
It's just, I wanna build a lis machine, a symbolics lisp machine out of this. I wonder if I could, if anybody's got the the, it's like ROMs, right? You know, in effect you're gonna download the schematics and, and burn it's Yeah. Onto the f dga.

Andy Ihnatko (02:06:07):
It's, it's, it's the idea that it's not emulating anything. It is creating a version of that chip in the N P G. And that's just, so I, I really want, I've, I've wanted to play with one of these for a while

James Thomson (02:06:18):
And, and I would say that, you know, there is some stuff where it's like the chip that they make, it's not exactly the chip, it's a functionally equivalent chip. So sometimes there, there is an argument that, well, this is really just fancy emulation. But sometimes it's not. It just, it's the best thing I've seen for like, running old consoles or computers, you know, com for era stuff and having it feel like the original and

Leo Laporte (02:06:44):
The software you use is called Mr. Fusion. So that's good. <Laugh>, this is great. Now can I, you gave us a link to the Mr. Dell Wiki and then of course it's a, there's a GitHub repository of, of heart of software. Where do you get the, where do you get the hardware?

James Thomson (02:07:08):
So there's various ways you can do it. You can, you can pay somebody and they will send you the entire thing. Ah.

Leo Laporte (02:07:15):
Or do it yourself, or you

James Thomson (02:07:16):
Can, or you can do it yourself, or you can do what I did, which was source the, this developer kit that has the FPGA on it, and then buy from a variety of sources the other boards and put it together. It, it's, it's, you know, you can, like, you can buy the bare circuit boards or you can have the whole thing <laugh> and, and to buy like a, a fully specked one, it's about $500 and it's cheaper than that if, if you don't need all the pieces.

Leo Laporte (02:07:46):
Yeah. There's a lot of soldering. If you do it this way, I'm gonna, I'm,

James Thomson (02:07:50):
Yeah, I, I I don't recommend that, that approach.

Leo Laporte (02:07:55):
Wow. That's very cool. So P PCB way is the PCB manufacturer, and you can get all the parts that go with it. But the, but the thing to do is, and, and we'll put this link in the show notes is to go to Mr. Dell on GitHub, github.com/m mis s t e r dash d e v e l.

James Thomson (02:08:14):
There's a, there's a wiki and there's, there's a lot of information. There's a discord. Yeah. So, you know, if, if you want more details, it, it's all out there.

Leo Laporte (02:08:22):
Very cool. Very cool. I'm just fascinated by this. That's amazing. Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko (02:08:28):
This is, this is why, like, I've, I have a lot of old Macs and well as a, just as, as as a display, cuz I enjoy like the object as a design. But things like this are why I'm not terribly interested in like, getting my SE 30 or my two ci like actually booting up and running because, okay, so let's get the p let's get the power supply recapped. Okay, let's make sure there's no corrosion on these, on these things. Let's, okay, how are we gonna get a keyboard hooked up to it? It's more interesting to see it's it's, it's less nostalgia and more, isn't it interesting to, to create something brand new that will ha I'll be able to play the old hits the way we like them. The, the,

James Thomson (02:09:02):
The problem is it leads you into thinking things like, what if I could get one of those really nice broadcast c r t displays, <laugh>, you know, that, that they used. And like I could hook it up to that and then I could see what, you know, the super Nintendo games look actually looked like I

Leo Laporte (02:09:20):
Played them in. Wow. What is your, what is your Mr currently operating as?

James Thomson (02:09:25):
I would say like that my, my comfort platform is like going back to Super Nintendo because Nice. That was, that was really, so I, I foolishly decided like a month before my final exams of university, what would really be good was if I bought a Super Nintendo,

Leo Laporte (02:09:46):
Oh boy. <Laugh>. Oh boy. How did that work work out for you? Success

Andy Ihnatko (02:09:52):
In the world? Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:09:53):
<Laugh>.

James Thomson (02:09:54):
Wow. Hey, look, I passed perfectly well. It was hard. Good. All right. But I don't recommend this as, as a strategy, but I was playing Zelda back then as well, so, you know, it's like what comes around.

Leo Laporte (02:10:05):
Isn't that funny? You're still playing Zelda all these years later. Yep.

James Thomson (02:10:09):
It's slightly more complicated.

Leo Laporte (02:10:10):
So this is interesting. This is hardware that it's not, it's not a software emulator. This is hardware that actually duplicates the circuitry of a variety of older machines. Very interesting. Mr. M i s t e R and on GitHub, Mr. Dash Dell will get you started. And there's wiki and all sorts of stuff that you can learn about the Mister Wow. Andy anco Pick of the Week.

Andy Ihnatko (02:10:39):
Mine is a simple one. Brad Root has written a really cool, cool screensaver that I just, he, he tweeted it at me and I said, okay, screensaver. I like screensavers and thought I wouldn't like it that much. I, I thought, okay, whatever. But oh my God, I'm enjoying it a lot. It, it's called Alene. It is it is it all, it is, it's an, is a screensaver written in Swift that all it is is essentially a J s o N that will download images from a list of URLs that are continually updated on the screen server. However, what it's drawing from is a collection of constantly updated Baja style abstract art generated by stable diffusion. Oh, wow. And again, that, that's why, like, I read that, I read that in the in the GitHub description. It's like, okay, well maybe that could be okay.

(02:11:26):
But as soon as I put it in, I forgot, like, my God, these, this artwork that I, I don't know how, what parameters they're giving it, but it is generating legit beautiful pieces of art that don't look like, they don't look like stable diffusion anything. They don't look like AI something. They're just very, very pretty almost distractingly pretty on a big screen. And it's free. And as I I I I think that there isn't enough development of cool screensavers because when your screen isn't doing something, it could at least make your office your house pretty. And this definitely does that.

James Thomson (02:11:57):
I will say that I wrote a whole screensaver with 18 modules last year for the Relay podcast, Aon oh. Yes. And, and that will prompt, who knows, I may update that for their, their next one this year. But that was actually ton of fun to actually go back and like, try and do an after dark style.

Leo Laporte (02:12:16):
Did you have a flying toaster in your screensaver?

James Thomson (02:12:19):
I had, did I do that? So in the about screen for PE for Dice by Peacock, there is a screensaver, which is very much flying toasters. Oh, that's cool. But it's flying dice. But that's, I have, I, I did sort of fireworks and all, all the kind of traditional things.

Leo Laporte (02:12:36):
How fun is that? Where can we get that?

James Thomson (02:12:39):
Well, you needed to have backed the ah, the podcast theon to raise money for the St. Jude kids cancer charity. What a, so it was an exclusive for that. And

Leo Laporte (02:12:49):
What a generous thing for you to do. That's really cool. Well,

James Thomson (02:12:53):
It was a fun thing and it is for a really good course. Yeah. So

Leo Laporte (02:12:58):
I'm impressed you could write a screensaver and how many modules? 10 modules in a few days? It

James Thomson (02:13:03):
Was 18 modules. 18 module module. Cause I got carried away. Wow.

Leo Laporte (02:13:05):
<Laugh> that's great.

James Thomson (02:13:07):
Which is not something I ever do.

Leo Laporte (02:13:09):
You could find the is it Elaine? How do we pronounce that? I don't know. E a l i It

Andy Ihnatko (02:13:15):
N it's is spelled e a l a i n Brad is kind enough on his own personal blog to explain. It's like Ali with a very soft n at the end of it. It's, it's Gaelic.

Leo Laporte (02:13:26):
Ah, well then James should be able to pronounce that too. Yeah, I live in Glasgow. I do not. It looks very Scottish, doesn't it? And there is a GitHub as well for this where you can see how it works and download it for version 0.1 for Mac os. I guess the only caution I'd say is, is it the images come from a node script he's running at his house that then uploads the images to s3. So this, you know, it's free, which is good. This who knows how long he's gonna want to continue to do that. But yeah, very fun. But there,

Andy Ihnatko (02:13:59):
But there's very little there. He's not, he's not doing the stable diffusion from his own machine. It's, it's from a from a work group. And so I haven't seen like rep, I haven't seen any repetition really at all. Yeah. From this. Yeah. So it keeps, he keeps it fresh and, and I don't, I don't think that's gonna be like up forever, but while it's up, I

Leo Laporte (02:14:15):
Enjoy for, enjoy it for now. It's fun. Yeah. Mr. Alex, Lindsay, I think it's up to you to blow my budget.

Alex Lindsay (02:14:24):
Not at all.

Leo Laporte (02:14:24):
Not at all. Not think's been yeah, pretty affordable.

Alex Lindsay (02:14:27):
We're all going pretty, pretty affordable. I am recommending there's this little program that, that people can get called Apple's keynote. Oh, it's Freak. I just got updated last week. Yes. and it has an important feature in it that some people, it's worth talking about just because it now imports SVGs. I know that that doesn't sound like a big deal <laugh> to a lot of people. But for many of us getting objects in and having them become shapes and then being able to make those shapes into, into our own custom, custom libraries and be able to break them

Leo Laporte (02:15:03):
Up.

Alex Lindsay (02:15:03):
So if they, you can break up the shapes, you can turn 'em into custom libraries. There used to be an AI to keynote filter that used to work that stopped working. And if you're building a lot of, if you build as many presentations as I do not having your, you know, being able to have custom, a lot of custom shapes in there, that, and it, and it's, again, it's not a, an object. So when it becomes a shape inside of inside of Keynote, it means that you can fill it with different colors. You can treat it like a shape. There's a, it's, it's a different class of, of Object. And that hasn't been something that has it, it's been something that we've been asking for almost since version one <laugh>. So, so it's just been like, and why can't we have, why can't we just import this?

(02:15:45):
And so they, the, the last update has made the, the SVGs available. And so it is a, for the, those folks that are that use Keynote a lot, they'll be quickly checking for their updates. I didn't, I don't have everything automatically updating and, and literally people were sending me Discords going keynote now has SVGs <laugh>. So this is a very geeky keynote user, heavy keynote user feature that that has been added. There's a couple other things, I don't know what they are, but the SVG thing is worth it. And, you know, I still think that Keynote is probably one of the most powerful communication apps ever built. So it's, you know, if you're not using Keynote to its fullest I would highly recommend looking at the feature set because it, it's much more robust than everything else. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (02:16:32):
I, I think it's, I think it's one of the best apps that Apple is making at the

Alex Lindsay (02:16:35):
Moment. Oh my gosh. It's just, it is, I'm putting together, I have this really complex presentation I'm building right now, and I, and I realized working on it, someone was talking to me about it, and I was talking about how I started really going off on Keynote about how great it is and everything else. And I, and I said, I've made more money with this, this app than any other app that I have on my phone. You know, like, like, is it cause it's the one that you, you, you sell ideas with, you know, and you, and you, I've sold more projects with it than anything else. And it, and I use it up. I mean, I use up all the little animations. I'm a, I dig deep into, you know, my, you know, all of my my, my object order and how they all come on and, and, and it, and I don't have anything.

(02:17:14):
I never have a slide that just pops up and like, this is the, all the information. It's like, I'm gonna bring this out, this out, these pop these out, these move these in. And there's so many great little animations in there that help you tell the story. If you're an educator or someone obviously doing business, I mean, it's just, and I've built whole videos with just keynote, you know, just, just build the entire video out and send it to someone, you know, with my voiceover and it's just done. And those ideas, you know, then pass around really nicely and, and cleanly. So I'd, I'd highly recommend if you haven't played with it, and if you haven't taken advantage of it, it's free <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (02:17:49):
It's,

Alex Lindsay (02:17:49):
It comes, it comes with, it comes to your Mac, you can download and your iPad. So it's, and it's just, and it works on your, I mean, it, it works on the, I and the iPad version, by the way, has all these features that the desktop version doesn't have. I was sitting in, apple has these educator free educator seminars, which are really great, by the way. And they have, they were showing stuff like, you can just grab with your pencil, you can just grab an object and just animate it by just moving it around with your pencil <laugh>. Just, just build a motion path like this and then, and then hit animate and use animated it out. And there's little things like that that even for me, were, we're new because I don't, I don't use the iPad to design my, I I use them, I use it to flush out my, or knock out my ideas, but I don't usually use it to refine them.

(02:18:30):
And there's a lot of tools in there as well. So and it, you know, you can control it with your watch <laugh>. You can go frame by frame with your, with your watch. And so it's, it's a, it's an incredible application that I'd highly recommend if you haven't played with it a lot. And so I'm just using the excuse, the fact that it finally added this, probably the only feature we want, we've wanted more than S V G or, or equal to S VG is U S D Z. And so we're, we're all crossing our fingers. So I

Leo Laporte (02:18:58):
Will now explain what Alex just said. <Laugh>, SVG stands for scalable Vector graphics. These are the images you'd create with like Adobe Illustrator. Instead of a bitmap, they're actually descriptions of triangles, lines and circles. And so they scale infinitely, infinitely small, infinitely big. And I get, I didn't know that you couldn't import an an svg. I

Alex Lindsay (02:19:20):
Turn 'em into shapes. You can bring, yeah, you can bring, you can bring linard in in the past, but it wasn't, it was treated as an image.

Leo Laporte (02:19:26):
It becomes a bitmap all of a sudden. And so,

Alex Lindsay (02:19:29):
Well it's, and it's still scalable, but the main thing is, is that it, you couldn't turn it into an ob a true object inside of it. And what that means by be turning it into a true shape means that as you, cuz a lot of times what you're doing in, in Keynote, or at least what I do, is I decide this is gonna be black and white presentation, or this is going to be a colored presentation, and I can very quickly change all those colors of all my shapes to match whatever the look and feel that I'm building into. Looks like if you have an image, you can't do that <laugh>, like, so you can't, right. You can do little bits and pieces. You don't have those handles. So treating it like a shape, being able to break it up. So for instance, there's shapes. You can take a shape in Keynote and select it and then go in and say, I want to, you know, and, and again, yeah, you can combine shapes that, you know, so those, so

Leo Laporte (02:20:12):
You haven't lost your, the, the the

Alex Lindsay (02:20:15):
Features, the outline of the sv Yeah. Like for instance,

Leo Laporte (02:20:17):
You've

Alex Lindsay (02:20:17):
Got it. A good example is when you do the, when you do the earth shape there's a, like an unrolled, an unmapped, a mercat projection of the earth in Oh, and

Leo Laporte (02:20:25):
You get all the countries, oh,

Alex Lindsay (02:20:27):
It's kind of nice except for no one needs Antarctica <laugh>. So like, so you're always like, so you're always, so what I have is I have a, I have a shape of, I, no one cares about an that

Leo Laporte (02:20:36):
Be real Antarctica. I'm leap to

Alex Lindsay (02:20:38):
Climate science everywhere,

Leo Laporte (02:20:39):
I think.

Alex Lindsay (02:20:40):
But, but no one cares. And so I, I I, what I did, okay, I, I break it up into points and then I delete Antarctica and then I save it as a shape. So that one, I add mine. I'm like, I don't need that. I don't need that part. And so those are the kind of things you can do with an SVG that you can't do necessarily with any of the other image files that you have there. You have to just crop them. And so, yeah. It also makes, makes your, if you start using lo a lot of logos, I like my logos to print well and which means that I'm bringing in giant pings of all my logos or, or so and so forth, or

Leo Laporte (02:21:09):
An SBG now and

Alex Lindsay (02:21:10):
Yeah, not sbg and it

Leo Laporte (02:21:11):
Just imports as part of the, you know, choose and the choose command under insert. You can just import it and take it in and, and the image will do it just fine in there. Yeah.

Alex Lindsay (02:21:21):
That's nice. And so it's, thank you Apple. It's, it's really useful. And us easy one I was talking about is of course the 3D format that we hope it's everywhere in the Mac except it appears that it's everywhere in the Mac except for the office apps. So we feel like there's the, there's a certain level of pressure there that it's the, the, they're probably just trying to figure out how to integrate it. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:21:39):
Alex, Lindsay, thank you so much. Office hours.global is the place to watch Alex pretty much any time of the day or night. It's broadcasting early in the morning and then they take the, what is it, second hour, make it a YouTube video so you can watch those later. Best thing to do, go to Office hours.global and check it out. And you can see all the stuff and you can even if you want, join the Zoom call so you could be there live as

Alex Lindsay (02:22:05):
Part of the process. Yeah, we were talking about HTML graphics to this morning, which was great. S SPX is a, is what we use for our show, and so how those work. Generative art, yesterday of course we were talking about making a variety of there's a couple of things that, there's a couple tips there that are pretty, pretty useful and nice. And we've embarked on doing we're, we, we've got a we're doing accessibility on Saturdays for the whole summer. Our, it's usually education. And we had an incredible event. You know, we had an incredible one on Saturday where we were actually had, we had deaf panelists and a s l interpreters and all of the, and they were seamlessly talking back at, it was, you know, us figuring out how to make that all work so that, that they could, they were just part of that conversation.

(02:22:52):
And it worked much better than <laugh>. I was a little, little concerned about it, but you could see here, you see someone talking, but there's other places where there were actually if you go to other, and so it was a lot of us figuring out, but if you look at, like, when someone's signing in the main window, you'll see someone signing there. Yeah, there you go. And that's someone talking. And now our, our, you know, so then, then what has the ASL interpreter has to swap, you know, switch, shift gears and and translate to us,

Leo Laporte (02:23:16):
Oh, that's interesting. From our desk panel panels. So the speaker is, is speaking in asl and then you have an interpreter, right? Speaking it on his headset. Wow, that's really cool. I'm really glad you're doing this on Saturday. That's very, very exciting. But all of this information is at office hours dot Global, and that's really a great gift to the internet that you're doing. It's a lot of fun. If you wanna hire Alex for your next event, 0 9 0 Media. Thank you, Alex, Andy, and aka, when are you gonna be on GBH in Boston? Next,

Andy Ihnatko (02:23:48):
I'm gonna be on the Boston Public Library at quarter two. One Eastern Time on Friday. So show up by yourself. A coffee, enjoy the entire show. Usually they have musical guests on Friday too, so it's a, it's, it's a pretty good time. And if you can't be at the Bosom Public Library on Friday listen@wgbhnews.org live or later. That's probably also gonna be on the YouTube channel for WGBH News, but it's also, oddly enough, W G B H news.

Leo Laporte (02:24:12):
Anything else you're doing, any other appearances you wanna share?

Andy Ihnatko (02:24:16):
Might have something to talk about in three and a half weeks.

Leo Laporte (02:24:18):
Excellent. I will, I will set my timer <laugh>. If this were Reddit, I would have a bot tell me. Set. Remind me.

Andy Ihnatko (02:24:25):
Set. Set your timer. But as usual with me, don't hold your breath,

Leo Laporte (02:24:28):
<Laugh>. That's kind of the story of my life. Set your timer, but don't hold your breath. I like it. Mr. James Thompson, we are so grateful to have a couple of hours with you and your thoughts. We really appreciate everything you do. Peacock is an amazing thing. Dice is an amazing thing. It's

James Thomson (02:24:48):
A, it's a pleasure to, to be here. I mean, I, I'm quite happy to come back the next time one of Jason's children graduates

Leo Laporte (02:24:56):
Or every four years. Yeah. no, we will have you back soon. I like having a developer on, cuz you've, you've got your hands in the gears in the works and we like to know what it's like in there. <Laugh>. Thank you

James Thomson (02:25:08):
James. Yeah, sometimes your hand gets caught in there. That's really what happens.

Leo Laporte (02:25:12):
<Laugh> don't wear a long scarf. That's all peak calc.com. If you wanna get Pcal on the iPhone, on the iPad, on the Mac, it's much more than a calculator kids. But if you are looking at your iPad saying, why, why, why is there no calculator? There is the only calculator PC

James Thomson (02:25:33):
And you can have a free one. So yeah, there's peak light. Peak light give money.

Leo Laporte (02:25:38):
Peak light, man. There's no reason not too.

Andy Ihnatko (02:25:41):
So James messages never trust a longtime Apple developer who still has all his, all his fingers. That means you've

James Thomson (02:25:47):
Experienced Yes, yes. <Laugh>. I mean, it was sometimes, sometimes the damage is internal, but this is always there.

Leo Laporte (02:25:55):
And I will note that the cap being worn by this is fine guy. The dog in your lower right of your screen Yep. Is available on the pea calc store. If you want a, a cap with the number 42 on it that you and the insiders will know what that means. That is a great cap. There's also t-shirts and more and even a peacock pea calc pascal pin. So you honor Pascal with

James Thomson (02:26:21):
Your pe Yes. That is our, the, our panda mascot who is indeed named after the language. And that's nice. The, the mathematician. But it, it's also Pascal and peak calc. It's kind of very similar <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (02:26:34):
Oh yeah. It's almost an Enneagram. Almost it, you peak cal. If you have more than one peak calc, it's an anagram. Thank you James. Thank you Andy. Thank you Alex. Thank you all for joining us. We do a Mac Break weekly every Tuesday, 11:00 AM Pacific, 2:00 PM Eastern Time. If you wanna watch us live you can 1800 utc which means it's dinnertime for James. All you have to do is go to live twit tv. There's a live stream audio or video there. You can chat with us live at irc twit tv Of course Club Twi Me Club TWIT members get a special kind of, we consider it like the the club level. All you have to do on discord, so you can chat there with us. Seven bucks a month also gets you ad free versions of all of our shows.

(02:27:20):
Special shows we don't put out in public. Like Micah Sergeant's, hands-on Mac, hands-on Windows with Paul Theat. Scott Wilkinson's. Home Theater Geeks really is a very important part of our our monetization these days. As advertising for podcasts starts to dwindle you pick up the slack and we thank you for doing that. TWIT tv slash club twit thank you club members for making this possible. After the Fact Club member are not ad free versions of the show for the club add supported versions available on our website at twit tv slash mw. There's also a dedicated YouTube channel to Mac Break Weekly that has even more ads and <laugh>, some of which we didn't put in there. And of course the best way to get this show is to subscribe. If you go to twit tv slash mw, you see links to some of the big podcast applications, but also the rss cuz we are an RSS feed and always will be. And you can subscribe right there and get the show the minute it's of a Tuesday evening. Thanks for everybody for joining us. Now I gotta say sorry to say it, time to get back to work cuz break time is over and I'm going to Disneyland.

Mikah Sargent (02:28:34):
Oh, hey, that's a really nice iPhone you have there. You totally picked the right color. Hey, since you do use an iPhone and maybe use an iPad or an Apple Watch or an Apple tv, well you should check out iOS today. It's a show that I Mikah Sergeant and my co-host Rosemary Orchard host every Tuesday right here on the Twit Network. It covers all things iOS, tv, os, home bot, os Watch, os, iPad os. It's all the OSS that Apple has on offer and we love to give you tips and tricks about making the most of those devices, checking out great apps and services and answering your tech questions. I hope you check it out.