Upgrade - 267: The Quiet Death of the Newton

Episode Date: October 14, 2019

James Thomson joins Jason to discuss converting an app from iOS to Mac via Catalyst, the prospects for using Catalyst on his most profitable app, and the end of an era as his app DragThing and all other 32-bit Mac apps fade away. We also sort out Apple and China, because that's not a complicated topic at all.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 267 upgrade is brought to you this week by express vpn linode and time page i am jason snell mike hurley is on assignment and by that i mean we've assigned him to take a nice lovely vacation somewhere in europe where he's having a good time without us but i have replaced him with a fellow european a fellow brit in fact it is developer of p calc and drag thing we'll get to that and dice by p calc and a frequent guest host on the rebound podcast and an soon-to-be player on total party kill along with mike hurley and others so much hype for james thompson hello hello we all sound vaguely alike to you lot. So drop in replacement. Can we get another UK person? Yeah, sure.

Well, thank you for being here. You're from a further north part of the UK, though. Yeah, currently. Who knows how those borders are all going to work out in the end. But I don't know. We may not be alive to see it. Who could tell? Anything can happen.

It's the 21st century. We'll start the positivity early on the podcast. Yeah, oh boy. It's going to be great. Well, okay, we actually, no one wants to hear about that, borders and things, because we're going to go to the Snell Talk question, which you can also join in in answering. This question came from Andrew, who said, I chose a question, by the way, because Mike revealed a few weeks ago that he does not choose these at random. He picks them out specifically for each episode. And I chose one because you and I have been doing this for a long time.

I chose one that is for about the past. What long lost feature from the Mac or even the Apple II would you bring to today if you could? That's what Andrew asks. And my initial thought was, honestly, my initial thought was most of the stuff is better now right that's the first thing is it's i was like what about like like multi-finder it's like no it's all better now but i came up with one which is the appearance manager and and also kind of related kaleidoscope these were uh tools that let you do you had different themes in mac os before there was the dark mode and the light mode many many years before there were themes

uh and there was a whole theme system that basically got boiled down to platinum the one theme a theme system with one theme uh but in the kaleidoscope utility uh let a lot of people uh make their max look terrible basically but it was fun it was a fun time and people could build their own themes for the entire mac os and uh this was in the sort of mac os 8.5 era and right up until the last minute there were a bunch of other themes it was like high tech and gizmo and there was a nice sort of like hand-drawn one from japan as well and they all went away and high tech lives on only in the cinematic classic batman and robin on alfred's 20th anniversary macintosh yeah we actually published in mac user we published screenshots of all those themes right like we were we're like oh look at all these themes and

then eight five shipped and it's like platinum you get platinum which is i mean more or less is what we think of as the mac interface like it was uh it it influenced the early days of os 10 it was sort of the brushed metal of its time um and i want to point out also in batman and robin one of the greatest things in batman and rob, and there are many great terrible things in that terrible, terrible movie, is Batman's keyboard. Every few months, somebody discovers a tweet I made. I must have great search engine optimization for this one tweet, which is if you do Google the right search terms involving Batman's keyboard, you get my tweet with a screenshot of the keyboard batman uses it is the a layout unlike any i'll put a link in the show notes a layout unlike any you've ever seen before it is the it is not a qwerty it is not a dvorak it is the ucarni keyboard um the top

letters are u-w-c-a-r-n-y uh I don't know. What are you doing, Batman? What's that keyboard like? But those were the days. Those were the days. The high-tech appearance and the Ucarni keyboard. James, what's your favorite long-lost feature that you'd like to have today? Well, I had similar thoughts to you. I was sort of running through things in my head that I remember.

And most of that stuff is better or there's no need for it anymore. And this is kind of true of this as well, but I do kind of still miss the hierarchical Apple menu. There used to be an Apple menu items folder in the system folder, and you could put aliases and files and folders and stuff in it, and it would appear as a hierarchical list in the Apple menu. And I'm not sure it'd be particularly useful today, but my Mac OS X dock, spoilers for a future segment, had a dock items folder, the same level as the desktop folder. And it was based on the same concept that you could put things in. And if you drag something into the dock, you'd end up with an alias sitting in this folder. Yeah. And I mean, you can make a folder in the dock and put things in it.

So you can sort of do this now, but it is for people who don't remember this or weren't around then, it was pretty cool that you could, you had one customizable menu on the system and it was the Apple menu and anything you put in there showed up in that menu everywhere,

no matter what app you were in or anything. It was great. Some people put an alias of their hard drive in it. That was terrible. It was very bad. Yeah, once you go down like five levels deep, those hierarchical menus get quite tricky. Yeah, and if you move your mouse a little bit too far off, then they all go away and then you've got to start again.

It's like a really bad video game. All right, I've got a little bit of follow-up. One that Mike and I talk about a lot is the bridge keyboard do you have the bridge keyboard i do um i have uh my uh ipad is the 10.5 uh ipad pro and i've got the bridge keyboard for that and i really like it as a kind of turns it into a little laptop which is great for traveling and stuff where i don't want to be carrying around a huge uh huge 13 inch laptop so uh mike and i both have them and and uh and they're nice and it's my favorite really uh external ipad keyboard they're in the news this week because there's there's a story we'll link to from the verge um they they filed a lawsuit

against this company called libra that announced a keyboard that looks just like their keyboard except it has a trackpad and what's sort of fascinating about this so apparently they have some sort of patent about the sort of like the clips uh that connect it to the ipad and they're really just trying to say that this is a duplicate somebody duplicated their product and is now selling it. And there's some fascinating angles, like they can't really tell who the company is behind it. And they sued a company that says they aren't behind it and that they aren't involved anymore and that they've removed it from their website.

So it's kind of unclear what's going on there. You know, patent lawsuits and knockoff products are not that interesting to me, honestly. I think what I found more interesting is that as a part of this, because the Libra keyboard has a trackpad, Bridge said that they actually have been working on a Bridge keyboard for iOS with a trackpad. And they plan to sell it as a, I think they said as beta product and we'll ship it early next year and that's interesting because i've been there's been a lot of speculation about whether they do that they have a surface version of the bridge keyboard that has a trackpad because surface will support native pointing devices ios 13 of course adds mouse support using assistive touch so it's an accessibility feature and i i'm you know without

getting into a lot of detail i will say i have spent a lot of time using a lot of different input devices on ipad os 13 and uh when you talk about it in a trackpad context on a on a right below a keyboard i think it's very hard if you're using it in that context to get away from the judging it like a MacBook. And let me tell you, if you haven't used the keyboard or the cursor mode on iOS 13, iPad OS 13, it's not, it's something it's usable. It's not great. Like there are lots of things about it that are not great. And that's not the fault of any mouse maker or trackpad maker or keyboard and trackpad maker. It's that Apple, this is what Apple has decided at least for now to implement. And it's got lots of issues. So I'm not sure that even regardless of whether it's a

bridge product, or it's this other knockoff product, or anything that anybody would do, I'm not sure that anyone who's excited about using an iPad with a trackpad in iPadOS 13 is going to be satisfied by the experience. It might be okay. It might be usable, but it's not going to be good. And that's because the implementation in iPadOS, I feel like is not good and certainly not up to the standards of what we expect for something like a MacBook, where I think we take for granted just how great the MacBook trackpad is in terms of precision, in terms of doing gestures, all sorts of stuff that Apple has really fine-tuned that iPadOS 13 can't do. Yeah, I thought it was interesting that they were referring to this as a beta product. Like, you know, it's a physical hardware thing that they are selling.

Yeah. And I think to call it a beta is somewhat, it's like a, you know, it's not like you're going to get upgraded to the full version. Yeah, so my feeling is that what Bridge really wants to do is warn people that this is not the like regular product that everybody should buy it's a weird thing that uses accessibility features that are not sort of not intended for this and that your experience is not going to be great calling it a beta and by the way cheers to you for saying beta because we've beaten that out of Mike. He doesn't do it anymore. But you're sticking with it and that's great.

But I think they're just ultimately, I think what they're doing is sort of like trying to scare people away and say, look, this experience isn't going to be great. So if you buy this, just know what you're getting yourself into. But I think that that's the challenge here is that even if it's the best engineered iPad keyboard and trackpad in the world that is possible to be made, it's still not going to be great because of the way it's implemented in the OS. Yeah, I mean, I also, you know, I have somewhat complicated feelings about patents, particularly software patents. But with this, it's not really about the trackpad at all. They're really just, you know, this product has a trackpad. And so this has caused the reveal of their own trackpad-based product. But they really seem to be going after them just for the sort of hinge mount points. Yeah, yeah, we'll see.

I think that they feel that it's a knockoff and that bugs them. And since they do have this one patent, they have something that they can try to take action about. But I agree with you. I don't love that. At the same time, I also don't love the idea that they went to the trouble of designing this system and then somebody said, oh, that's a great idea and then just copied it.

That is sort of what the patent side is supposed to do. But anyway, I think it's a fascinating thing and if this product comes out, we'll take a look at it. But I think everybody who's spent time with the mouse mode in an iPad OS 13 would probably say that it's a work in progress for sure. And hopefully there's progress at some point down the road because it's great that it's there. It is an accessibility feature.

It's not meant to be a full-fledged consumer feature for like general purpose mousing and it's great that you can do something with it and that's useful but the question is where does apple think it's going to go and is apple going to embrace using a mouse on ios or do they feel that this is exactly what they wanted to do and no more and we just don't know so we'll see um i want to move on and do something that's technically upstream uh and and although it is way more than upstream at the same time and this is uh touching the third rail a little bit but i feel like you gotta you gotta talk about it so well hi james yeah come on the show you you know, no difficult topics here. No, nothing difficult at all. So a bunch of stuff happened this week. There's a story about how, I'm going to back into this with the upstream story, which is about how Apple told the producers of its Apple TV Plus shows, among other things, to be careful to not offend China in creating the content that they were creating for

apple tv plus um and and this this in context of a bunch of other stuff including apple taking an app down in hong kong that was being used by people in hong kong to avoid where you know the unrest is where there's uh where there's tear gas, where there's other things like that. And they took it down and then they put it back and then they took it down again. And Tim Cook released a statement saying, well, we took it down because this was being used by bad people to commit crimes and things, which seems to most observers to not be true. And then that was just sort of a flimsy excuse by the government to get this thing that was being used out of the out of the store. And, and this is the same week as a general manager in the NBA

posted a note positively discussing the protests in Hong Kong, which led to Chinese TV dropping all the NBA games and all sorts of other things there. In video gaming, there was the guy who, or was he a player? He was a player. And he made a pro-Hong Kong democracy statement at the end of the match. And he got basically suspended for a year, his prize money taken away, and the two commentators who ducked under the desk when he said it, who had nothing to do with it, were also suspended. And Blizzard faced extremely strong protests against that. And they have a statement, I think it's like a fountain or something just outside their their campus about you know everybody's voices being important and people had covered that up and yes it was a whole thing and so they and there was a lot of walking back of things as well so the nba um the nba

commissioner uh said that their their employees have the right to free speech and they can say what they want in the case of blizzard they posted a statement where they basically said okay you know he he did this after the fact and we're going to suspend him but not for as long and we're not going to take his prize money away because this doesn't have anything to to do with him as a player and we you know they so they walked that back a little bit too but that reflexive action um was certainly striking in a week where all of these other things were happening and um so a couple of things here because this is really about apple and china and i want to start with the tv plus stuff just because it's related to upstream which is how i'm classifying this mike can get back to me later about it and that is there was a really nice

twitter thread by matthew panzerino from tech crunch where he said what i was thinking which is this is literally the hollywood playbook every studio does the same this is panzer movies are edited to appeal and not offend china the culture clash is one of optics and interests it's always been a bad practice but the public perception is that tech is above it all and neutral, driven by marketing positioning and a culture of secular techno paganism. And that's cracking. We know that industry is craven. We know that entertainment is fickle. Tech was supposed to be different. And the realization that it is not brings us to the current theological crisis. I think that's well said. If you know anything about the entertainment industry, you know that this is not Apple being this unique company that's trying to position its entertainment to be sellable in China.

Everybody does this. Marvel movies are a good example where they took a character who is from Tibet and made that character from somewhere else that was not a disputed, unrestful place within China. unrestful place within China. And the list goes on pretty much endlessly because the Chinese market is so big and entertainment companies are reluctant to basically close the door on that. The larger issue for Apple is not just that they're an entertainment company who's worried about the Chinese market, but that I would argue a core part of Tim Cook's strategy, even before he became the CEO of Apple when he was just the supply chain guy, is using Chinese labor and Chinese industry to create an incredibly efficient and effective supply chain. And it has allowed Apple to sell the huge volumes of products that it sells. People don't remember.

It used to be Apple couldn't. that it sell people don't remember it used to be apple couldn't there was a period where apple made too many things and and their and their inventory was way uh too large and then there was a period where apple struggled to make enough things and tim cook one of the things that tim cook is great at and why he's the ceo of apple now is because he was able to get that supply chain working super efficiently because the most efficient supply chain is one that makes products as cheaply as possible that are of as high quality as possible and everyone that pops off the line is at a pace for every sale that goes on like there's literally no boxes in a storeroom somewhere it's it's essentially we're making them and selling them and it's 100 efficient apple supply chain isn't 100 efficient but it's 100% efficient. Apple's supply chain isn't 100% efficient, but it's very efficient.

In addition, Tim Cook has spent a lot of time as CEO talking about how bullish he is on the Chinese market as a market for Apple's products. And the fact that it is a tantalizing market, I think the last estimate I saw said that the middle class in China is rapidly, like in the next few years, headed to be the size of the entire US population. And those are Apple's potential customers. So this has been a huge part of Tim Cook's strategy for Apple. And the truth is that five years ago, I would say it looked like a pretty good strategy because there wasn't as much unrest in China or related to China. And there wasn't a trade war between the US and China. And it looked like this whole kind of dependency, international dependency was something that would benefit Apple because it could work across all of these different borders in order to build its products. Apple, as a result, is perhaps the most dependent tech company on China. And that leads us to today where Apple

is, Peter Kafka wrote a piece that was where he said, this is on Vox. He said, unlike tech companies that haven't broken into the country, or only do minor business in it, Apple is so deep in China that leaving it could be catastrophic even if the company was willing to forego the 44 billion dollars a year in sales it makes in china it can't leave the deep network of suppliers and assemblers that build hundreds of millions of iphones every year and there was a story that we referenced here a while ago in the new york times about tim cook being kind of tech's top diplomat where he's balancing china and uh and the trump administration and trying to be a go-between. But he has to do it, really, because his business is predicated on the idea that

China and the U.S. get along and that he can do business in China while also doing business everywhere else. And I just think it's fascinating because five years ago, I think everybody would have said this is a really canny strategy on Apple's part and Tim Cook's part. And now I think Peter Kafka is right, which is if Apple can't make things in China, regardless of selling things in China, it's a catastrophe for them because that's where they make most of their stuff. And it strikes me that if apple isn't aggressively trying to find alternate means of building products that are not in china um they're making a colossal mistake because the amount of leverage this gives china over apple is enormous and you know apple can't

just put its foot down and say no china we're not going to do what you say, because up against, you know, local laws and things that they may not actually agree with. And, you know, there's been a general sort of sentiment this week of like, well, Apple's just as bad as everybody else. And I don't think that's true. because Apple has put such an emphasis on, you know, privacy and things and being the sort of the, in quotes, woke tech company, this reflects especially badly on them, even though, you know, I think they're trying to walk this middle ground very carefully. But yeah, I mean, it's a position that they put themselves in. You know, walking this, I mean, this is what, this is that tim cook as the diplomat is all about is they have been trying to walk this line carefully i think what the last week has shown me is walking that line is great until the

point where you can't walk it anymore because then then what do you do and Apple, it looks like the way their business is structured, they can't get off that line and say, see you later, China, because they can't. I mean, they can't. They're not structured to do that. And leaving aside the fact that they've already structured the way that they do things so that Apple's products in China use completely different services and their servers are in places where the government can look at them. Like there's all of these things that they've already done in order to do business in China. It's just, it's a very difficult situation. I am disappointed in the

memo that Tim Cook sent out to Apple employees because he was taking the ideas of why that app needed to be banned at face value when I think most observers on the scene who are objective about this would say that that was really a pretense in order to get that app out of the app store and out of people's hands as much as possible. And I think that's unfortunate. But this is something that any company that has to do business in China has to reckon with, which is it is an authoritarian state. And their standards in terms of speech, especially about China and about politics relating to China, are not our standards in the West, in that we feel people should have free speech, and they think you shouldn't say anything about what China does if you aren't in China. And if you're in China, you should also not say anything about it. That's essentially their take on it. So

it's a difficult situation for any Western company to be in. And boy, you could not have picked a better week i mean everything went out on the table now and you know i i don't know how apple navigates this i think that apple will continue to be very careful about it because like you said they have they have a lot to lose and they are trying to thread the needle here they're trying to walk a very fine path and make every effort to stay on that line and walk that line. In the background, though, they've got to, right? I mean, they've got to realize that this is a weakness. This is a dependency. It's one of those, you know, back when I was working at a big company, we had the SWOT analysis, the strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and threats. And it's like, this is a threat. This is the what happens if we can't do

business in China? What happens if our supply chain in China is in a rut? And it's like, well, you can't put all your eggs in that basket. You just can't. Because we've seen now that this world that we live in today more complicated maybe than you thought it was five years ago things that you thought maybe would never happen five years ago are kind of happening now so what do you do and uh it's just you know i think this is this is going to be a big challenge for for apple in the next who knows how long in the next many years probably yeah yeah well that was fun we're going to talk about Catalyst soon. But first, let me tell you about our first sponsor.

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with deep preferences allowing you to configure almost everything to suit your needs. Moleskine Digital Studio cares about your privacy. Your events and schedules stay private and cannot be accessed by third parties. To find out more about TimePage, go to timepage.app and you can download it for free for a 14-day trial. Thank you to TimePage for supporting Upgrade. All right, James, let's talk about you. It's my favorite topic. So one of the reasons that when we were finishing the show last week, I thought about having you sit in for Mike is there's a lot of stuff going on right now in the Apple developer world,

and you're in the middle of all of it. And so we have a lot of different things. You touch on the news in a bunch of different ways. Now you're everywhere um but i wanted to start with uh with catalyst so you had an app called dice by p calc in which has been an ios app for a little while not too long in the mac app store on day one it was in the little featured check out these apps that came from ios little featured area in the app store uh so you were one of the early adopters of a catalyst in the mac app store taking your ios app and turning it into a mac app on catalina and uh before i ask you about it i wanted to at least mention we have a whole background here like you and i have been playing dungeons and dragons um this spring and summer with an interesting group of people including mike and mike's wife adina and tiff armand uh and

other people you may not know if you're just listening to tech podcasts but liz miles and tony sindelar is the dm and that's a new season of total party kill on the incomparable that starts november 5th i'm gonna plug it now if you want to listen to mike and a bunch of other people on tiff and adina me and liz play dnd and james too um and and mike mike uh wanted to play this with a bunch of people who he knew and we wanted people in the same time zone so it's mostly people in the uk um and james you hadn't played dnd since you were a kid and we pretty much made you a dice addict right yeah it was like i last played dnd in the 80s and uh it was actually the conservative party and margaret thatcher that stopped me playing dnd um because

of teacher strikes caused the um after school uh sessions to be down. So that was my main D&D playing thing. But yeah, I realised that the last time that I had played D&D before this campaign was before Mike and Adina were actually born. And this made me crumble to the same dust that I found in my parents' attic as I went to look for my old dice. But yeah, this kind of got me into, oh, these dice are quite pretty. I will buy these. And to the point where I had a sort of dragon-sized hoard of dice that I sleep on at night. Now, if those dice are pokey, that's got to be uncomfortable for you to sleep on yeah well you got to do what you do yeah that's right dragons aren't comfortable they don't sleep

comfortably on their hoard of gold but they they're happy because they've got the gold there and you said something after our i think it was our first or second session sure go ahead it's my fault i can't believe you haven't written some kind of dice app. And I had the pCalc about screen, if people don't know. It was a sort of area in pCalc that I concentrated all my whimsy into. And it had regular D6 dice in it, but it didn't have polyhedral dice. And I thought, let's prototype something in the about screen so i got some uh polyhedral dice models and put them in and try rolling them this kind of works okay so i gave myself a project and it was i gave myself one week to write an app

and this is like not a very realistic schedule but i thought well I know all the technology of doing the 3D stuff so let's see if I can build a dice rolling app in a week and it in fact took me two weeks but two weeks from creating a new project in Xcode to actually shipping it on the store is a kind of a record for for me in getting a product out and I have spent quite a bit more time on it since, but it's kind of been my evenings and weekends relaxation mental health project that the about screen was a few years ago. But yeah, it was also a small enough project that I thought, well, let's try this and see where it would go as a catalyst app. All so you've got the ios app it's shipping it's my fault um it's got lots of different dice you can choose different dice

themes so you can have all those different pretty dice without having to buy more and more sets of dice you just change the preference in ios i still bought more dice that's the problem so uh so then you did this and i've got questions about pcalc properly but let's start with dice bike pcalc because this was your one that is shipping um and you you know it was out last monday on catalina um and so i have a lot of questions for you about the process of taking an ios app and putting it on the mac uh the source, from somebody who actually did it, because I think this is good in helping us gauge sort of where Catalyst is and what apps we might see and why we might see some and not others. So my first big question, though, is Apple says

you can compile and run an app from iOS in Catalyst with the check of a box. Did that happen? in Catalyst with the check of a box. Did that happen? Did that work? So technically, yes. When I first built it and ran it, the window was black aside from the buttons because SceneKit was not working in that particular build of Catalina. And that was something that I had to wait two weeks for that book to be fixed. So that was kind of like, I hit a roadblock pretty quickly. But because the source, it was written for like iOS 12, iOS 13 era. So it was using modern APIs. There wasn't a lot of cruft in it. It was pretty simple. It did, you know, it was literally check the checkbox, click run, and it goes. But in a sense, that's not really surprising because Catalyst started out as the iOS simulator, which is part of Xcode that when you're developing your app, you know, you can run it in a window on the Mac as a way of, well, I don't have to, you know, copy it down onto the phone.

It's a much faster way of developing. So they had that technology for basically building your iOS app as an Intel binary and running it on a Mac. And this has sort of productized this into a way of doing that and making a Mac app. And then they've moved on from that because that was kind of like the stage one where we had the Mojave, the four Mojave apps were using this technology. And then they had another year of development to see where it would go after that. And it's not gone as far as I would like, let's say. But it has progressed. So, yeah, from a first stage, you can do this. And I did it with pCalc as well. And pCalc took me a lot longer because there was, you know, older APIs that I was referencing for backward compatibility, say, you know, I, I'd adopted the new API, but I had the old API reference. So you have to kind of get rid of all that that stuff to get it to build but you know the basics work and it is kind of you know i've been quoted in a number of outlets for being

very critical on catalyst but it you know is miraculous that it actually does do that um so but that's that's the sort of the stage one all All right. And there's a lot more stages. Right. So what issues did you have in converting it over? Like what were the things that popped up that you weren't anticipating? Well, I mean, there were a lot of bugs. I've complained about lack of documentation and things like that and and a lot of that stuff bugs especially kept going right up to the wire and beyond the wire because

there's still this stuff uh scene kit doesn't run on an on any mac with an nvidia gpu in it uh through catalyst you it throws an error about wrong compiler architecture out to the console and you get this black window problem and and that shipped in in in the the gm and it's fixed i believe in the uh 10 15 1 so you know it felt like this project was coming in pretty hot much like most of catalina and all of apple's products yeah it fits right in that's great um so you know that was like the main thing and then it came down to like i have an app it basically works and it works the same as the ipad app but you know is this a mac app right it's like not really yet um so what did you have to do to make this i think i feel like this is a very important thing that that apple did emphasize at wwdc which is this

this concept that you check the box and then you add i think they called them finishing touches and the idea is it it's okay you've got an ios app in a box that, you know, in a window that runs on the Mac. But it's not really a Mac app at that point. It's an iOS app in a window. So what do you have to do? So you did this, you designed Dice by PCalc, presumably not really thinking about Mac design decisions. And then you've got, even though it's a relatively new app, and then you sit down with it on your Mac. And I imagine you immediately say, oh no, this won't do for a whole list of things. I mean, so the real big one that was sort of bothering me was I, you mentioned before that you can pick all these different dice themes,

and the number of dice themes grew bigger and bigger. So I ended up using, you know, the little spinning picker UI elements that they use for the date pickers and things like that. And I use that so you could just sort of, you know, flip it and scroll around and you could pick a theme. And on Catalyst on the Mac, they feel terrible. You know, you can't even click and drag on them. You have to move over them and use a scroll gesture over it. And it just felt so out of place. And there's a lot of things, like the more iOS native UI you use, I think, the more out of place things feel. And for that, I was like

for that, I was like about, you know, three weeks away from the expected ship date. And I was like, I can't ship this. I really don't like it. So I wrote my own sort of pop-up menu button code, which is not perfect, but it works, you know, and that immediately, the fact that you could just click on it and, you know, it works like a and it looks pretty good it's it's not quite right but i mean all of these catalyst apps viewed from a perspective of a traditional mac app are not quite right but it's pretty close it's way closer than that spinning wheel yeah i mean it was my it was my what can i do in a couple of weeks uh version of this it reminds me of what when you did the custom key pop-ups in pCalc in the early days of the iPhone, where I believe you said this is one of the classic blunders, which is rebuilding an entire UI element yourself.

Yeah, I mean, you should not do this. This is Apple's job. And when you start building these things you find oh these things are just entirely built of edge cases and apple has to deal with all this stuff it's like you know what if you open this thing and it's right at the bottom of the screen uh what if you know there's just lots of things and so it i wrote what i could but this I mean, this comes on to talk about later and what I would like to see improved, but you know, this would be Apple's job. And if you look at like the best Catalyst app, I think still is the podcast app and podcast app has its own like little native

Mac controls. So it has, you know, like the little segmented views and it has pop-ups and it has all these things. I believe Steve Jordan Smith said that they're using private APIs to do that. And it's not something that's available to the likes of us. So if we want to make an interface, particularly outside the preferences window, which you can get some of that for free for just the preferences window. But if you want like a pop up in your main UI that looks like a Mac and works like a Mac and has all the feel of their size pixel-wise, which is not ideal. And some of the Apple apps, like again, the podcast app, opts out of this using a private entitlement so that it's, you know, not scaling it. So they have full control over things.

And so, yeah, other things I had to do. I scaled down the fonts because when it was on a mac screen it was like oh no these fonts all look far too big uh you need you want to customize the menu bar so that it's actually got mac commands it feels more like a mac app that was the first comment you made on the first build of the dice app uh when i sent you the uh you know the just the checkbox version it was like yeah i can tell from the menu bar yeah that's the first thing i do when i open one of these catalyst apps is i look at the menu bar because it's a great reveal because you remember

there were what was it that there uh back in the java days especially there'd be these apps that were actually in java and they would run and they'd have their own menu bar in the window which is even more horrifying and then and then they but they would have a mac menu bar and it would have essentially nothing in it but like quit and so i i found with catalyst it's been very interesting to move that way because there there are very basic things that go in the menu bar but because ios and ipad os don't have menus per se it really is up to the developers to say, what would I like in a menu bar? Because you have one on the Mac

and you probably should use it. It's a good idea. Yeah. And another thing sort of related off that is extensive keyboard controls. It's like for a Mac app, you expect to be able to drive the app without touching a mouse or right right although i was

just this weekend i was playing dnd and i used dice by peak out so i guess this is my endorsement uh but i i was using with the smart keyboard and i was typing in my dice rolls so it definitely benefited me as adding those keyboard shortcuts helped me on the ipad too yeah i mean and i think that is one of the things that depending how this goes in the future, I think is going to benefit iPad apps is that we will end up with these apps, which have got hopefully the strengths of both platforms rather than the weaknesses of both platforms, which can be the case with this cross-platform stuff. And yeah, I mean, it was things like that. It was keyboard stuff. It was like rethinking gestures because, you know, the two finger gestures like panning around don't really work through Catalyst. And, you know, there's even tiny stuff, which I doubt anybody will notice, which was like replacing the word tap with click anywhere in the UI and the help.

You know, that was just a kind of like, I didn't want the sort of stuff to start leaking out at the edges where you read the, you know, release notes and it talks about, you know, tap and tap here. I actually did this weekend was finishing up my work on my new version of my book about photos. And one of the things I did this time was really completely merge together the Mac and iPad and iPhone versions versions of photos it started out as a macbook and then it was a macbook with some ipad and iphone stuff added on and now it's just about photos on all the platforms and one of the things i've had to do throughout is when i'm referring to both i have to say tap or click or click on the mac or tap on iphone or ipad because it's different it's not the right word. If you use the right, the taps everywhere, you're, you're using the wrong word in a Mac context. So it's, it's a little thing, but, but I think it's important to say, you know, hi, Mac user,

I see you and you may not be tapping, you're clicking probably. I'm not a hundred percent happy with it yet. That's what I was going to ask is, is how are you feeling today about this thing that you've got in the Mac app store? I mean, it was, it was a, it was a kind of the point of it was an experiment to see where I could get and, and, you know, the Dice app, I like the Dice app. It's not like my main revenue stream. So if it's not the best Mac app in the world, it's not going to cause me problems. Unlike if it was say Peacock. But I wanted it to be as best as I could get it. And I think I got it as best as I could given a, the time constraints, because this was done in the background of trying to get Peacock ready for iOS and running into lots of problems there. And, you know, so this was like,

again, it was the, the weekends and evening project of, you know, let's see where Catalyst is today. What can I do? And I had a big list of, you know, well, I'd like to do this, but I can't do this because of X, Y, Z. And, uh, and, you know, there's things, it still feels a bit alien around the edges. You know, you, you can't resize it down to iPhone window sizes, even though my, my iOS app can cope with that, you know, because you can put it in split screen and whatever. And it'd be nice if you could make it just a tiny, you know, sliver down the side of your screen, but no, you're, you're limited to the minimum of sort of an iPad width. And yeah, I like it. It's, I, I've had sort of reasonable feedback to it nobody has you know said

this is the worst mac app i've ever seen so all right you've cleared that bar at least yes so um now this is obviously dice rolling is not yet your life and your life's work it's only on the side maybe in the future who knows but um if we step back from that and and having gone through this catalyst experience um i i'm i would like your wish list like what having gone through this is apple not providing to you that you think should be there for people who are trying to bring their apps over from ipad to mac so i mean it's technically it's not impossible that a framework like UIKit could build a Mac app that feels as native as any other Mac app, because that's exactly what happened

with AppKit. You know, people forget that Carbon was like the Mac, that was the Mac feel. And AppKit and Carbon kind of merged together in some ways, but, you know, AppKit came from the next world and it was adapted and it was made more Mac-like. So, you know, in the end, it's all just pixels on the screen. So it's all possible. So what I would really like is the Apple to provide sort of Mac-like controls, you know, like these pop-up menus or checkboxes or anything. I want to build a UI that looks exactly like a Mac without having to write it myself, because I feel that this is Apple's job, not mine. And, you know, if Apple even recognizes this by the podcast app using, you know, private APIs to do these kind of things,

they clearly know that it's something that a good Mac app should have. And again, with the scaling, you know, I'd like to be able to opt out of that and do everything myself. And there is a way that when you have an iOS app, there is a thing called the user interface idiom. And that's basically says you're running on a phone or you're running on an iPad, or maybe you're running on a TV or whatever. And it is just a way that your code can say, you know, I'm going to behave differently on this device. And so like, you know, pCalc will lay things out slightly differently if you're on an iPad and so on. And they could have, and they didn't add a UI interface idiom Mac, which would let you say, okay, I have this code. I'm now running on a Mac. Let's do things differently.

And that might be where they're planning to go because in Catalyst, they announced this sort of two, three year roadmap. And I think iPhone apps is next year. And then the year after that is a unified store. And at that point, I assume we're going to have the unified binaries that run, you know, the same app, literally same app will run on both platforms. But, you know, we're not there yet. And it be nice i think really what i want from apple um is i want some kind of like timeline or like a roadmap of where they think this is going to go because we'll come to this later but you know is is catalyst the future is catalyst um like something for the next few years? How does Apple feel about it?

All right. I want to move on beyond Dice. I know it's hard to believe and talk about what your thought process is about the app that you do have on the Mac as a native Mac app and the app that you also have on iOS, PCalc. But before we do that, I want to take another break and tell you about another sponsor. This episode is also brought to you by Linode. With Linode, you can instantly deploy and manage an SSD server in a Linode cloud. You can get a server running in just seconds with your choice of Linux distro resources

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Just throwing that out there. Okay, James, PCALC proper. You've got the iOS version. You've got the Mac version. Presumably, if you decided to use Catalyst for your Mac version, that would save you a lot of time because you're currently maintaining a Mac app and an iOS app? Yeah. I mean, the current Mac app is an interesting one in that it is actually a port of the iOS code. So five years ago, you know, the 64-bit writing was on the wall and I wanted to have an AppKit

version. And a lot of my effort had gone into the iOS version. And it was a case of, I wanted the core code to be the same. And I took the iOS app and I ported it over. And, you know, there's a lot of custom UI in pCalc around where the buttons are and things like that. So it wasn't as hard as it sounded. But then the code started to diverge because like the core code is shared. So if I, you know, change the logic somewhere on how a button works, that's fine. But the user interface code doesn't. So some features like there's layout editing, which I added to iOS years ago, and that's not made it to the Mac because I'd basically need to write that whole code again. And if I could use the same code on both platforms, this would mean the Mac would get features quicker. I would have more time to just spend

writing actual features, which is something I have not done, not been able to do a great deal of this year because I've been chasing Apple's various operating system strategies. And so, yeah, I would have more time to actually devote to the application. And this would be great. So what's standing in your way of doing that? iOS UI, as it currently is on the iPad, you know, there's a lot of popovers and tables and navigating down into tables and things like that. And they really don't feel at home on the Mac to me at all. Have you run it? Have you run your check the box and run Peacock on your Mac and gone, oh, no, no, no, no. Yeah, no, I that was the first thing I did. no i i that was the first thing i did i actually had a catalyst version of peacock running in mojave uh thanks again to steve trump smith um who showed me the

dark arts involved in building a catalyst app before it was allowed or before it was even called catalyst and i i went through that process to get a feel early on as to how it would be. And yeah, no, I did it as soon as the official way was out. I've kept it running. So I have this Catalyst app, but it just doesn't feel right. You know, everything is within a window and supporting multiple windows is something that's also on my roadmap for this. But even then, it's a sort of hard to put a finger on, but it's this sort of intangible, this isn't right feeling. Is part of it the idea that if you're a Mac user

using pCalc and going on about your business and then an update comes out that turns it into this, that it would be disappointing that as a Mac user, you'd be like, oh, what happened to pCalc? Well, yeah, and that's not something I would do until such time as it exceeded, you know, the quality. And that's the difficult part of knowing, you know, because I would love to do this. There's lots of things I would love to do, but I don't know that my customers would particularly love it. And yeah, and I think the key is to find this

sort of middle ground between the Mac and the iPad user interface, you know, that enhances the current iPad app and makes it better, but also is an app that when it's translated to Catalyst and arrives at the other end, that Mac users are not going to look at and go, what is this? I've been sold a pup. that Mac users are not going to look at and go, what is this? I've been sold a pup. I want my old one back. So how do you balance, you know, obviously, this is your balancing act, and you have to find the right balance between giving users something that's good and also saving yourself a lot of effort and a lot of time by going to a single app instead of two separate code bases. Yeah, I think, you know, user experience wins out in this case. And it's, you know,

the thing is, I have a nice functioning Mac app. You know, it's missing a couple of features, but mostly it has feature parity with the Mac and all the core stuff goes over. feature parity with the Mac and all the core stuff goes over. But it's using Catalyst like this when you have an existing Mac app, it's a sort of, I think it's a decision to be taken very carefully. And as soon as, you know, if Catalyst starts to get the reputation of, a bit like when there was the uh the iWork stuff was redone when they when they it got dumbed down right as people would say on the Mac and there was because they were trying to go for more of a shared code base and shared stuff between iOS and Mac and you know Apple made

that decision and then like improved the apps again gradually over time but yeah i mean i don't know if you've noticed this but people on the internet are tend to be quite vocal about things interesting and uh yeah i want to make that decision when the time is right so um having gone through this process where do you think catalyst is going is this is this like steve trott and smith would like to say that what we might say it feels weird and doesn't feel quite mac like yeah he he often will say actually well you know you'll come to think of it as mac like like this is going to be different and it's going to be more like uh what we see with catalyst and that the mac is kind of going to be redefined in a way that makes it more similar uh to catalyst do you feel like is this the future of mac apps or is this some strange

digression uh you know a temporary weird thing that happened to the mac along the way to wherever it's going? This is the 64 million bit question. I don't know. And I don't know that Apple knows. You know, SwiftUI is what they've positioned as the future. And at the moment, it's kind of still the distant future. You know, it's very good. People have used it for watch apps. And I believe that's where SwiftUI originated was with the watch project. But I've heard that it's not really ready for sort of a big, you know, Mac app. So it might be that the thing

that makes the weird look and feel that eventually becomes the Mac might be SwiftUI, it might not be Catalyst. But, you know, is Catalyst the new Carbon? You know, is SwiftUI five years away, 10 years away? Does Catalyst last 19 years like Carbon did? I think that's unlikely. But, you know, every app that comes over using Catalyst is, to a certain extent, technical debt that Apple needs to deal with in the future. I mean, even their own apps that they're writing using it. But, you know, not everybody is ready to jump on board SwiftUI yet. It's not finished by any means. And

it's, so we're in this weird position of, you know, if I was starting to write a new Mac app today, you know, what technology do I use? You know, if you've got an existing iOS source base, Catalyst is really appealing because it's a way to get started. If you're starting from scratch, do you start with SwiftUI and put up with the pain for a couple of years, assuming that this is going to be the future. I mean, if nobody adopts SwiftUI and Apple internally hasn't really used it for many things yet, you know, at what point, you know, does Apple say, well, SwiftUI isn't really using, isn't really taking off, but Catalyst is everywhere. Should we standardize and catalyst so i i feel that you know their their direction the the the big arrow that they're they've put down is pointing towards swift ui um i'm hesitant at this stage to adopt it uh but i i'm typically quite conservative in

adopting like i'll adopt new new APIs and features and stuff, but new sort of things like this, I'm a bit hesitant to jump into. Partially because, you know, people forget that Apple had a track record of turning up to WWDC and saying, this is the future. And then next year saying,

well, that future that we outlined for a few years is not going to happen. You know, there was a whole operating system that they talked about for a number of years, which didn't happen. Yeah, I have the T-shirt. I have the T-shirt as well. I'm not putting this in the same state as the original Mac OS 8, because I don't think that that's what's going to happen to it. But more roadmaps from Apple would be helpful in knowing what they anticipate. Right. Because if Catalyst has like a five-year lifespan, what happens, you know, if people bring all their apps over and then Apple turns around and says, well, you need to rewrite everything in SwiftUI now?

I don't know. I find that hard to believe that it will be deprecated like that. I mean, because it is essentially using the iPad stuff, and I don't think that that's going to go away. You never know. i am interested to see how the narrative about catalyst changes over time because already i feel like we had a lot of scenarios about how people could use catalyst in this summer and among them was oh you're an ios developer who's never been on the mac before and you don't know how to make mac apps well great now you don't need to um that seems to be gone like Like really what it is, is you're an iOS developer, or you've got a big iOS code base, and you want to bring that to the Mac relatively easily.

Well, you can, but you're going to need to learn some things about the Mac, because you're going to need to probably write some custom things and, you know, use AppKit for some things in order to make it a really good Mac app. And that's different. And I've heard from some developers who had no iOS experience who basically said, it's fine, we're pros, we can learn stuff. But it's great that we don't have to, you know, write a completely new app. We can take our existing stuff and then learn some stuff about AppKit and make a good app.

That's a little bit of a different story. But in the long run, I do think it benefits Apple to have iPad and Mac code bases shared because there's more going on. First off, there's more going on on the iPad than the Mac in terms of apps. And that's been true for a while now. But second, the iPad also kind of needs a little bit of a kick. And so being able to put both of those platforms together and say, see, you can write an app and appeal to these two platforms together. I think that's good for both of them and makes the iPad apps better and brings more apps to the mac but you know is that you're right is that

a five-year story is that a is that a 15-year story i i and it's probably not the long like that this isn't the next generation app building system right swift ui is supposed to be that this is sort of just extending ios to mac yeah and uh i mean apple are using it for their own stuff as well so you know uh maybe part of that is to you know build apps so that they know that this stuff works because that was one of the justifications for the finder being carbon was you know this this was a an app to show that carbon had this great long future, which it kind of did, sort of. Yeah. So I think it's like next year will be very interesting to see what happens after another year of development. And if things are pretty much the same as they are,

then it's clear where Apple's investing. Fair enough. Fair enough. Okay. I want to talk about Drag Thing. We're going to have a little wake for drag thing and take apart what happened there. But first, I want to read our last sponsor. It's ExpressVPN. Recently, over 100 million people had their personal information stolen, another data breach, social security numbers, you know, all that stuff. And maybe you were affected by this. The point is that this stuff is getting more frequent, it's more severe, there's all sorts of different things, password leaks, credit card, bank numbers. Now I'm going to talk about a VPN. Now will a VPN be able to help you have big corporations control your your data? No, it won't. But you can still protect your data

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And it connects. It's fast. Costs less than $7 a month. Was rated the number one VPN provider by TechRadar, CNET, The Verge, and others. So go right now to expressvpn.com slash upgrade to arm yourself with an extra three months of ExpressVPN for free. Support, upgrade, and protect yourself by going to expressvpn.com slash upgrade for three months free with a one-year package. Thank you to ExpressVPN for hiding my location from everyone and for supporting Upgrade. Okay, James, you had a funeral last week. It was after a long illness, drag thing died. It was 25. It was your utility that was kind of like the dock, but before there was a dock. And then after

there was a dock also, where you could click on things and it had like contextual docks and different apps and all sorts of things. Great utility. I gave it five mice on the Mac user Mac download library back in the day. And that's my first clear memory of knowing you was that I gave your app five out of five because it was so great and i used it up until a couple of years ago i still had it on my mac running all the time so yeah i mean i can't remember how we first knew each other i did some digging and i found an email um from april 95 where you were clearly beta testing drag thing yeah uh and i have no idea how you found me or i found you though that it's yeah i mean i don't know if i i just like would you post a news group or something i don't know i i

i probably did a compsys mac apps shout out um but back when you were assistant editor at mac user clearly my first job i mean i was working my first job as well. I was like just out of university, except I was still working at the university. Apparently, I found a bug, which is very exciting, because as I say in this email from April 4th, 1995, and this is completely accurate to this day. I beta test lots of software and too often I don't ever find a bug. This is true. Really, it's like, thanks for putting me on your beta list. I didn't ever see anything, but apparently I found something. So thank you for having a bug in your software in 1995. But I have no idea what that bug was.

No, I couldn't find any of the previous emails. And I don't have these. I have emails from 1995, believe it or not, but I don't have them from my work address, which is where this is from. So I don't, I i don't have it so this app came out in 1995 um you actually ended up working on the dock in os 10 for a little while um and there's a long story there there is a long story there you can find it on youtube i think you you've you've told that story um but uh that that definitely changed the trajectory of drag thing right because now there was a the concept of a system-wide dock came to mac os 10 so drag things primary feature which was to be a dock on your mac was no longer um you know you were i guess you were sherlocked but the good news is you sherlocked yourself because you worked on the dock yeah i also worked on sherlock which is this irony everywhere oh no but um the so it was

interesting because like in mac os 8 5 there was the tear off app switcher thing right uh which you could pull down from the the process or app switching menu and i actually wrote at the time there was drag i was working for apple at the time, and I had had an item in my contract that I could continue working on Dragthing in my free time. You never get that kind of deal these days if you're an Apple employee. But, you know, I was sort of fiddling away with Dragthing. And I was asked if I would do a version of Dragthing, a cut down version for Mac OS 8.5 to be bundled with 8.5. a version of drag thing, a cut down version for Mac OS eight five to be bundled with eight five. And so there was a drag thing light that shipped around about the same time, which was a cut down version of drag thing. And that was entirely written for Mac OS eight five. Uh, and it was going to be the, the tear off app switcher for that. And that never happened. That deal kind of went awry. I think was a uh a management chain uh change and whoever came in said well we're not doing that um so the the the app switcher got written

but that was my sort of first taste of it and then i was asked later on it was like i i knew i'd been working on a variety of things and i really wanted to work on Mac OS 10. And I'd ended up working on networking software, which is extremely not my forte as I'm a user interface person. And I was like, I really want to work on something else. And somebody contacted me and said, you know, we have this thing that we think you might be good for. And it was the OS 10 doc. And, you know, I knew then that, you you know that this would kill drag thing uh so i wanted to be the person who killed drag thing and it just took 19 years to die yeah yeah so what what uh so i always knew you as the drag thing developer that is that is always how i

knew you it's taken a long time to think of you as the pcalc developer i guess in the future i'll just think of you as the guy who makes dice apps apps. But for now, pCalc developer. When did that changeover happen for you? When did you go from being the drag thing developer to being the pCalc developer as your primary thing that you did? So when the iPhone came out and I first used it, I thought, this is something special. It was kind of like the first time I ever used a Mac, you know, there's a sort of intangible user interface magic about it. And I thought, well, I need to do something for this. So when the SDK came out, I thought, well, you know, Peacock sort of, I haven't really done much with it. It's kind of, you know, it's a product, it sells, but it's

not really our main business. So i will make this one test app this is kind of like the catalyst thing you know i'll take a small project i'll make a test app and i'll see how it goes first day of the app store or second day in fact because i get the sales results and i see the sales number and i think oh there's a problem here. And the problem is that this is going to be your livelihood now. Yeah. And it was, you know, there were only 400 apps on the store on that first day. So, you know, it had quite a lot of visibility in that day. So, you know, the first day of sales, this is a lesson for anybody is don't take the first day of sales as something that you can then

multiply by 365 and that is going to be your income because that's not how it works it's sort of there's tails off and then we'll hit a sort of steady state and sometimes you can raise that steady state as you become more well known and things but usually you get these spikes and you shouldn't it's the area under the graph that matters it's not the height of that spike right so so that that shift happens at this point and it's like okay i guess p calc and ios is your primary business well i mean it was uh the last big release of drag thing like the last paid a release was 12 years ago and it was the same year that the iphone launched and you know i don't know you know which is the chicken and which is the egg in

that situation you know was i just enticed into the ios world and then uh stopped putting my focus into drag thing or had my focus already uh sort of was it waning because i mean drag thing reached feature completeness sometime in the late 90s right and then it was just a case of polishing it and you know adding silly things to it and whatever but it the the basics were there and once you reach that sort of basics that it's not as interesting on a day-to-day thing. But, you know, I was still keeping it going and I was doing things and I wanted to keep it running as long as I could. And as long as I could, it just ended. Right. And we will. So, I mean, obviously it was a 32-bit app and we'll get to some of the circumstances around it.

But 32-bit apps go away entirely in Catalina and so uh drag thing won't run on catalina now uh but before we get there i want i want you to um talk about the the story that you told me a while ago about how you had to you had to do a rush update for drag thing and realize that you you could not actually update drag thing anymore and this was what a couple of years ago yes so um drag thing because it was a 32-bit carbon app apple stopped support for that uh in the x code that shipped after 10.6 so the 10.6 sdk was the last one that let you you know like link to uh things QuickDraw and QuickTime and all these old carbon technologies. But it was possible you could take a modern version of Xcode

and you could kind of hack in the 10.6 SDK and still build with it. And that worked for a while. Then at some point, 32-bit support went away entirely for building with Xcode. And what happened is sometime later, Kagi, who were the payment processor that I used for all my years of selling Dragthing, they went under remarkably quickly with no warning. And so there were all these apps that, you know, when you click to the buy now button would take you to a dead web server. And so I was still selling it at this point.

It wasn't making vast amounts of money, but I needed to patch it. So I ended up setting up development tools running in an emulator. And I had some stuff running like on Mac OS 9 to edit the user interface because I was using there was Code Warrior had its framework power plant. I had some stuff running like on Mac OS 9 to edit the user interface because I was using, there was Code Warrior had its framework Powerplant and there was an app called Constructor, which was what you use to create your user interface, like Interface Builder today. And that was, I was like, I need to edit the interface. I haven't really edited the interface in about five years or something. And okay, I'm going to need to, I'm going to need to do that. And then I'm going to need to run an older version of the OS that I

can run an old version of Xcode with the even older SDK hacked into it to build this app. And, you know, it's not like I was unaware that, you know, the writing was on the wall. It had been clear for a very long time because of the number of hoops that I needed to jump through to just keep this thing alive. I just I love the idea of software updates being made in an emulator. But what can you do? I mean, right. That was it. So you made so you made at some point in there was that the last the final drag thing update um i think there might have been one more after that i'm not sure that

i kept trying to convince myself that you know drag thing was still going and every now and again there would be a slightly bigger update um but you yeah i think i knew in my heart that you know the patient had died quite a long time ago and you know just because it twitches every now and again when you you uh give it an electric shock it's not really alive all right that's oh okay that's a now it's a frankenstein that's frightening um would you so obviously it was written in classic Mac OS, brought over to OS X with Carbon. Carbon's going away, which means that it would need to be rewritten completely, basically. Did you consider that at any point of saying, well, maybe I should just make a new drag thing? And I mean, I know you and I have talked about this before.

What would it be that's because i think you're right one of the fundamental premises of drag thing was made obsolete by the existence of os10 which was a long time ago now so you know did you think about like how could i keep this going or keep something called drag thing going into the future yeah and and i mean you know i'm i'm not ever ruling out doing something again at some point and calling it drag thing uh but it was like yeah the question is and we talked about this sometimes what would it be and it you know things like launch bar and alfred kind of took the power users who were the people who would use drag thing,

because a lot of people moved to these kind of keyboard based launchers and the dock and launch pad to a certain extent and spotlight took away the sort of beginner entry level people who just use a stock Mac. It's like, what is that middle ground? You know, do you try and go even more power user? And part of the other problem with it is every year Apple locks the OS down slightly more, you know, for legitimate reasons, because there's more code out there that's trying to do bad things. But if you're trying to write a sort of system level utility as Drag Thing was, it was kind of like a peer to the finder. You have to jump more and

more hoops uh especially if you want to be in the app store which you know there's the requirements of um this uh uh sandbox and things like that right and it's you know could i write something like drag thing today and i know there are people who are working on, you know, replacements. But again, with the, you know, the writing was on the wall for 32-bit apps, Apple has been kind of saying, don't make these kind of things for years now. And, you know, I see people who are working on things, you know, like Peter Lewis has got Keyboard Maestro, see people who are working on on things you know like peter lewis has got a keyboard maestro and you know it's going and it's a great product but he does keep running into these things where you know all now whenever you try and send like an apple event to this process you're going to get

some dialogues that pop up saying are you sure you want to do this and and all that stuff it just creates more and more sort of friction for doing a product like this. And so, you know, my heart really wasn't in it. I think that makes sense. And it would be a complete rewrite. That's the other thing is it's not you deciding not to continue maintaining it. It's literally it's been maintained in maintenance mode for a long time. It's literally, it's been maintained in maintenance mode for a long time. And now there's no way to continue maintaining it because the entire framework on which it's built has been tossed, which is funny. In a way, this is the quiet death of classic Mac OS, right? Because Carbon was the bridge from classic Mac OS to OS 10. And Carbon is now put to sleep. Like that's the end of carbon. Catalina doesn't have carbon in it anymore.

It's finally over. It's funny that Apple maintained, like we're talking about classic Mac OS. 19 years later, having that bridge stuff finally go away. It took a long time. This is also the quiet death of the Newton because some of the Newton code was still lurking in the system and that's gone away in catalina as well so this is really a kind of clearing the decks and a necessary

one i would say but yeah it's when you've got like you know you've got an app that you've worked on on and off for 24 25 years the prospect of like slate, start again, that's quite a hurdle to get over. And, you know, I figured it would probably take me a year to get to the state where I would have something that I was happy with. But even then, it probably wouldn't have all the functionality, if that was even possible. But the key thing is, that's a year that I couldn't spend working on Peacock. And, you know, especially with iOS, you have to keep up with this stuff. If you let your apps get behind, you know, things stop working. iOS breaks things a lot more than the Mac does in terms of compatibility.

So, you know, every year you've got a big laundry list of things you need to do. So, you know, PeCalc is my revenue stream. So could I take a year off from doing that to do something else? Which maybe, I mean, I know how many people use Dragthing because I can see the software update. You know, how many times a week does the software update mechanism get pinged by the copy forlornly looking for that new version of drag thing never to come so people are using it but but people are using it but the thing is the people who are still using it are the people who have their entire lives in it right you know the people who are using it as a sort of you know database of everything you know it's not

they've got all these like clippings in it they've got all their urls you know database of everything you know it's not they've got all these like clippings in it they've got all their urls you know they're organizing their their work through it you know and i i've had people i had somebody the other day who emailed me who's one of these people who who basically said yeah i've just upgraded catalina um how do i upgrade drag thing to make it run and i'm like oh i'm really sorry to tell you that this is not going to happen and you know i i've had like i stopped selling drag thing a year ago because you know the writing was really on the wall there because apple had said at wwdc you know this is it um that this is going to be the last os that is going to run 32-bit apps and so i stopped selling it because i didn't want people

to be buying it last week so if that to find out if that person was running mojave or actually running high sierra they would have gotten alerts saying i guess the alerts probably said p calc or a drag thing is old and you should contact the developer and i'm sure that they thought well i'm sure the developer's on it and then continued to use it yeah and uh you know they'll get those alerts every i think it's every 30 days or something like that and i had like the drag thing website for the last year um has had the the sort of the black background and the 1995 to 2019 yeah you know i was going to do the whole steve jobs lowering you know raising the coffin putting carbon in it picture but uh i don't know that many people would get the reference and steve jobs and coffins it didn't feel quite right

at this point but anyway it was like uh to quote uh hitchhiker's guide you know the plans were on display um people shouldn't have been surprised but you know of people were surprised and because you know stuff works and we haven't had these kind of extinction level event operating system releases for a while now did you have how many how many people did you get uh who who who upgraded to catalina and asked why their their uh their drag thing or their p calc weren't working anymore uh i had you know a good sort of half dozen people i had lots of people i mean there was more than that who have emailed me in the previous months. But, you know, post Catalina who are like, now what do I do?

And PCalc, there are updates. Just get an update to PCalc. It's fine. Yeah, I mean, PCalc 3.9 was 32-bit. And there was people who never upgraded. But there's been a 64-bit version of that for five, six years. And clearly, I'm not very good at advertising the fact that I've got new versions. So, I know we should at least address this because people on Twitter already asked this question,

which is a bunch of people said, well, why don't you just make it open source so that somebody else could pick it up or it could be put in a museum or something like that. And the truth is, people can't pick it up. If you could just pick it up and update it, you're what you're not doing is saying, I've decided not to update Peacock anymore because I have other things to do. What you're saying is I can't, the code base can't go on. And so open sourcing, it would do nothing because except expose your code to the world that you probably don't want people to see, your private source code, because it can't run. It literally can't run.

And only a rewrite would make it work. And so there's no point. Yeah. I mean, there's no value to that code to anyone. It has a sentimental value to me, but it's not going to help anyone build a new utility and the old versions are out there everything has changed you can run it in emulation or run it on an old computer and it'll run fine you just you know but you don't need the source code to do that yeah i mean i think that there's there's a lot of uh uh value in revisiting these old systems

i've got ironically one of the emulators i use is 32-bit, and that's going to go away. So I'm going to need to run that emulator in an emulator in order to get my Mac OS 9 emulation running. But, you know, there's a value in going back and looking at this stuff. Because, you know, like when we started doing this stuff, you know, in the early 90ss there's history there and i think it's important history and you know people who weren't necessarily around at the time you know uh steven hackett being one of them who who have these kind of interests in the historical side you know it's good to preserve this stuff and the sites that do the whole you know abandon where you can download these old versions of things and run them in an emulator and see how things were. I think that's great. But those, as you say, those old versions are always going to be around. I'm going to have them, you know, available to

download on my site. I downloaded a copy of Drag Thing like two days ago to run it and to take some screenshots in an emulator for part of my obituary piece. But you don't get to see my source code, you know, that's mine. And people got kind of indignant when I was saying, no, I'm not going to open source it. And these are the, you know, the five reasons why. And they're like, you know, but, you know, think of the value to the community. And I'm thinking, what value to the community? What community? Also, what community? What value and what community? You know, you're going to look at this for 10 minutes or something. And for that, I have exposed some pretty dodgy code that I wrote when I was, you know, was I a teenager? I possibly was a teenager at the point. You know, it's, you know, none of this stuff was intended for public consumption. And, you know, I think there are things that have been open sourced, you know, like Doom and these sort of old video games and things where there is a sort of, there's a public interest in seeing how these things worked.

But there isn't a foot track thing. And, uh, the kind of the, you know, tending towards entitled feelings I was getting from some people rub me absolutely the wrong way. And I,

I joked about, you know, how Terry Pratchett, when he died as part of his, uh, uh, in his will or whatever, he,

he said that he wanted all his unfinished work on a hard drive and then steamrolled and destroyed so that nobody could pick up his half-finished stories and finished them and all this it was like that's it he's gone and i did think of the you know the here is the one copy of the drag thing source code in existence. I have deleted all other copies and now I shall drive over it in my steamroller. Well, I look forward to a low resolution image of the drag thing source code being in the pCalcAbout box and being able to drive a virtual steamroller over it as part of level three. It could happen. All right. Let's move on and talk about uh we'll answer some questions it's time for ask upgrade i've got a i've got to shoot off my own lasers here ask upgrade

it's here uh james you jump on in here uh costas wrote in and said what will it take in terms of features and design for apple to move beyond the bionic name for their chips we've been on bionic for a little while now. What do you think? I think it's purely when Apple's marketing department decides that the name isn't cool anymore. I think it's literally nothing to do with actual features. It's just, you know, does Bionic still sound cool? Yep, let's use that. I don't know how a TV show from the 70s

spawned something that sounds cool in 2019, but this is where we are i think yeah i think there there will be a feature in the chip that they want to highlight because the the fusion and bionic was them sort of marketing their multi uh multi core and the performance cores and the and the energy cores and all of those things like it was a way to kind of express in terms of a cool, fun word, what they were doing. And if they have a new thing they want to express in a different way with a cool word, they will do it. But it is, yeah, it's a marketing term.

I think that's all that it is. David wants to know, does no one using Mac OS Catalina have an old Steam library or do all the old games magically work? I don't think they magically work. I think there are a lot of 32-bit games, but I got to be honest, if I'm using Steam, I'm mostly booted into Windows on my iMac using Boot Camp and not actually playing them on the Mac on Steam. Yeah, I mean, I use Boot Camp for the occasional PC-only title. Divinity Original Sin 2 was one that I played recently. But I don't like sitting in the office to play games. So I tend to use like a PlayStation 4, Xbox, Switch, those kind of things to play games because I can sit in the living room and it's slightly more social. But, you know, all the Mac Steam games in my library, as it turned out,

were 32 bit. And people say, oh, you know, just recompile them, you know, all the Mac Steam games in my library, as it turned out, were 32-bit. And people would say, oh, you know, just recompile them, you know, check that checkbox. And it's like, A, that's not how these things work. And B, who's going to pay the Mac porting houses who did that original work? You know, even if it is just simple, somebody needs to sort of sign a contract, get these back or or do it in house or whatever and a lot of this stuff is yeah it's part of the 32-bit apocalypse that those games are never going to come back but you know they will run in boot camp and probably the older games will run quite happily in something like vmware fusion or whatever right uh get used to emulation if you want to want your nostalgia yeah and the good news is there there's that weird period in the middle in emulation where the emulation makes everything

too slow but the good news is if you wait a few years then your emulator the device that you're running the emulator on is so powerful that it can emulate the old thing as fast as it ran natively if not faster you just have to get through that middle part first. I ran into this problem when I was doing a talk about Easter eggs earlier in the year, and I wanted footage of the flight simulator Easter egg that was in Excel. And it was written for a particular speed of CPU, and it ran so fast under emulation that, you know, you would sort of barely touch the control and the thing would fly to the other side of the map because it was running like 10 or 100 times faster than it was supposed to. has a menu item that is that which is do you want me to constrain this to the speed at which the apple 2 ran because if you don't do that the cursor blinks very fast and you can play a game of computer baseball in seconds it's sometimes useful if you've got like a commodore 64 emulator and

you're loading something off a virtual tape and it's like uh i'd just like to accelerate this so i don't have to wait the 20 minutes i waited as a child for this game to load. Exactly. Nick wants to know, what apps do you have in your iPad today view and which of those are pinned? Because now we can run little widgets on the side of our home screen. Well, my answer here is probably extremely obvious in that it is Peacock. Because, I mean, this is product placement, but that is literally what I've got. All right, I've got Carrot Weather,

Fantastical, and Shortcuts. But during the baseball season, I also have MLB at bat, but it's not the baseball season for my team anymore, so I don't. Michael would like to know, what are your future plans for Dice by Peacock? Since it came out,

lots of people have reached out to me with role-playing systems that aren't just your standard dnd fifth edition saying oh it'd be great if you could do xyz something that i've never heard of and it's like okay i write that down in a file and i have this file which has been growing at an exponential rate of all these different possible things i could do with dice um i think in the short term, the main thing that I'm going to do is John Gruber complained about my use of Arial for the digits on the dice. He said that I was I trying to kill him, I think was the phrase. And I am going I'm

planning to replace the font purely for him with probably the San Francisco rounded font. Oh, wow. Nice. Very nice. There's also that an Easter egg for the Daring Fireball dice, maybe? Yes. To have a go at him, I actually, this was suggested by Alien Sims that I should make some Daring Fireball dice. So I did actually make some Verdana font and with the Daring Fireball logo on one of them. And because I'm me, I actually coded it up and made it a real thing. And I sent a screenshot to John

and he complained about my not 100% quite right fonts again. Yeah, you use Verdana, which should not be used in as a uh in that in that method in that size which very john that was very jump it was my idea to put the star on the six though i'll say that yes sorry i i should give a but but i said i have enough blame for dice by by pick up already actually but i the thing was i had to uh ship a very quick update to that because scene kit changed or has is about to change uh in the betas that just shipped such that all the dice became

invisible oh no so i had to do i had to do a very quick change so i rushed out a change and then i thought oh no did i leave in the john gruber d6 dice and i had forgotten whether i had commented that code back out again uh Thankfully, I hadn't. But John said, oh, why did you do that? And I said, because I did not seek permission from, you know, the owner of this. And he said, it's better to ask forgiveness than permission, which I think is him saying that I should put that thing back in as a research. So I'll do that. I'll keep my eyes open.les wants to know as the ultimate podcast designated hitter does james support the designated hitter rule this is a sport question

do you have an answer so i think from context that this is baseball correct i'm assuming that this is somebody who fills in for people in some roles, given that I am the, whenever Lex is away doing whatever Lex does, I am on the rebound and I am doing the same role here. Yes, it is. In baseball, in the American League, pitchers who are not very good at hitting baseballs are replaced in the lineup by a designated hitter who doesn't play in the field, but hits instead of the pitcher. So everything I know about baseball, I have reverse engineered from American metaphors about sexual experience. So I'm glad that I picked up enough to answer that. I was worried that you were going to strike out there, but you hit a home run. Good job. And I think that we are at the end of this episode of upgrade james thank you so much for being on and guest hosting for mike it's been a pleasure i have gone from uh guest to guest host so in

another 16 months it follows that i'm probably going to be running relay fm i'm sure they'll come to you for the post uh when they put up the black page that says RelayFM, you know, died on this date. And I'll have you do that and turn away all requests for the source code. RelayFM will live forever. Yeah, that's true. It's never going to happen. But, you know, who knows? Thank you again to James.

Thank you to all of you listeners out there. If you want, oh, this is the thing Mike always says. If you want to send in your hashtag AskUpgrade questions, just tweet at us with the hashtag Ask hashtag ask upgrade and it all gets collected in a spreadsheet it's great and you can also do that with hashtag snell talk thank you to our sponsors time page linode and express vpn and of course we'll be back next week when mike will return from his lovely assignment wherever he is sunning himself now but until then say goodbye james thompson goodbye james thompson