Upgrade - 308: The Adventures of Dr. Icon

Episode Date: July 27, 2020

This week Stephen Hackett joins Myke and Jason to consider the best and worst changes to app icons in macOS Big Sur. What makes a good icon? How are books shaped? What is the origin of the term "email"? What happened to Lou? Staring at icons for a long time really makes you think...

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 308 today's show is brought to you by pdf pen from smile and fully my name is mike hurley and i'm joined by mr jason snell hi jason snell i'm mike hurley summer sorry it's my friend summer fun, my friend. Summer of fun. Yeah. It's going to be a fun one today, man. Oh, boy. We do. We have a fun guest later on in the episode.

We're going to be joined by Stephen Hackett. And we're going to be doing a draft of sorts, kind of. We're going to be talking about last time we spoke about the sounds of Mac OS Big Sur. This time we're going to talk about the icons of Mac OS Big Sur. Hold them in your mind. Indeed. Imagine them as we paint word to talk about the icons of Mac OS Big Sur. Hold them in your mind. Imagine them as we paint word pictures of what the icons look like. But we have a hashtag Snell Talk question comes from Mark and Mark wants to know, Jason, if you were to cosplay at Comic-Con, who would you cosplay as? Okay, something you may not know about me is I don't like wearing costumes.

I don't like dressing up for Halloween. I haven't since I was a little kid. So not my favorite. Not my favorite thing. But if I did need to wear a costume at Comic-Con, I thought about this, and I don't have any great answers. My best answer is probably one of the Doctor Whos. I'm not sure which one.

Okay. Maybe Patrick Troughton the second doctor his his body shape is not a bad fit for mine so maybe I would go with that so that's that's my Doctor Who fans answer is uh the second doctor is seen in the episode the two doctors because he had gray hair then and I have gray hair so that would be perfect that's what I'll do that that's it Cosmic Hobo Patrick Troughton that's me if you would like to send in a snow talk question to help us open an episode of upgrade just send out a tweet with the hashtag snow talk or use the command question mark snow talk in the relay fm members discord and it may be included in a future episode some follow-up for you jason uh this one is kind of like follow out for the the rest of the week, but maybe kind of also

in the past. We'll see. So there's just a few things happening this week, which I think could be interesting, and I want to mention we may talk about them on our next episode. So on Wednesday this week, a bunch of CEOs from technology companies are appearing in front of the Congress in the US, virtually,

to talk about antitrust complaints. I believe this is Sundar Pichai of Google, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, and Tim Cook of Apple, right? I think they're the four that are going to be appearing in front of the, is it the congressional committee, subcommittee for antitrust, I believe is who they're going to be talking to. But I'm intrigued about this because it's either going to be really interesting or an absolute train wreck because previous congressional hearings with tech ceos usually devolve into this like how does my granddaughter send i messages kind of conversation um but my hope would be that they're

actually going to have intelligent conversations about antitrust. So yeah, I'm keen to see what happens with this one. So we may touch on that next week, depending on what happens. I think it's very likely some interesting stuff about Apple will be discussed. And then on Thursday, Apple will be reporting its quarterly earnings. And I'm intrigued to see if these two play into each other in any way. Yeah, right. Will Tim have maybe some of his predetermined comments will appear in both places?

That wouldn't surprise me. Save a little time. Because everything Tim says, they've gone over it, right? Like Tim is a very careful, controlled guy who they've got the message. They'll control the message. But yeah, we'll see. We'll see what the COVID-19 effect is on Apple's business too. And there's still not been a macOS public beta. So I don't know whether that's going to come.

They originally said it would be by the end of July and that's this week. But who knows? We live in strange times. Maybe it'll happen. Maybe it won't. Same for watchOS. But the watchOS one, I wouldn't be surprised if it was later the mac os one that it's not new to have public beta for mac os um i think understandably they they

kind of held off on this one because big server is such a top to bottom change that they may have wanted to really make sure they were confident before they put the public beta out um but you have you used much of beta is it beta 3 or beta 2 of macOS now? Is it 3? It's developer beta 3. And how is it feeling, developer beta 3? It feels okay. Some apps are like preview I couldn't launch in beta 2.

It would just spin and then crash. And it launches in beta 3. So that's a 100% improvement over beta 2. It seems okay but you know i'm not doing my primary work on it or anything it's a basically a stock laptop with the with the new os on it so it's you know it's it seems fine it's it's looks great i have some issues with the icons but we'll get to that i have some great news for you jason oh there will be new emoji after all so we'd previously been previously been talking about the fact that,

this is ages ago now, that there will be no new emoji for 2021 because the Unicode Consortium was delaying the agreement of Unicode 14 because of COVID-19. They were deciding they're not going to get together and that all of the individuals on the board probably had things in their companies that they're part of, because the Unicode Consortium is made up of people typically that are part of larger organizations

like Adobe and Apple, Microsoft and Google. And they were like, oh, no, we'll just leave it for a year because we have other things to work on. But there is now the announcement of Emoji 13.1 that's going to plug the 2021 gap so from emoji pedia proposed new emojis for this interim release include facing clouds mending heart heart on fire faces spiralize as well as new gender options for the bearded person emoji it's going to be a much smaller emoji release if uh all the technology companies just follow the 13.1 spec i mean of course they can do whatever they want really um and maybe more gets added to this in the future i don't know but at least there will be some uh emoji in 2021

after all hooray that's good the world the world needs more emojis and so let's go for it. That sounds good to me and it means that my favorite episode of Connected will exist next year. So that's good. Yeah, in a much, much smaller scope, I reckon. Might only be a mini topic, not a full topic. That's okay.

It's fun. For those who have not heard Mike and Stephen quiz Federico on what each icon image represents, he has to guess what they mean. And if you haven't heard those, it's amazing, and you should. The Jeremies, they're called now, named immortalized for Jeremy Burge. I will put in the show notes a link to the Jeremy's from 2019 in case you want to hear. It's the best.

And a shout out to Jeremy, who's somewhere on a boat. Always. He's always on a boat. Always on a boat. I have some upstream headlines. They're all Apple focused. The trailer for the second season of For All Mankind has been released, which was a surprise.

Seems like a surprise. What I've heard is that they've shot much of it, but not all of the season. So they were able to put a trailer together based on what they've already been working on and producing. I've also heard that they're coming back to the set

soon. I don't know where this is shot i it might be in vancouver in which case canada is in better shape than the u.s and they might be in better shape to to resume this um but i don't know where i don't know i've heard that they're gearing up to to continue to finish shooting for it um so they uh it's it's one of these cases where they i'm sure they don't want to release a partial season but uh they're not quite done but they've been able to do some of the production and they obviously are confident enough that they put out a trailer so that's great love the show yeah i'm i'm really looking forward to the trailer itself looks good right it's it's intense right

because it's the 80s and there's like ronald reagan and there's the the soviet threat and it's the cold war but then then there's a shot of astronauts in space suits on the moon with guns right it's like how does that work and that's not good so yeah so uh for all mankind the cold war is it going to get hot on the moon where it's very cold and hot i don't know yeah i'm i am very much looking forward to that that's going to be hot on the moon where it's very cold and hot i don't know yeah i'm i am very much looking forward to that that's going to be really cool uh apple have acquired the rights to fireball a documentary from verner herzog uh which is an interesting pairing um this this no i i can't wait for it i i can't wait for verner herzog today, inside his home in Philadelphia, John Gruber writes articles about computers. There we go.

I mainly included this link in the show notes today because I knew you would want to do a Werner Herzog impression. Of course. Fireball explores how shooting stars, meteorites, and deep impacts have focused the human imagination on other realms and worlds, and on our past and future. When humans came out of the cave 80,000 years ago and looked at the stars, what were they thinking? That's all I got. So this is another movie, which is of importance because, according to a report from Fast Company, Apple is looking to vastly increase

its feature film catalog due to the success of Greyhound, which you spoke about last time. They want to increase their movie output to quote Netflix-like levels, according to sources, potentially looking to have a new movie every month with two to four of these

being big expensive blockbusters. Think your Scorsese movie that they're working on, right? And then filling out the rest of this slate with documentaries, like the Werner Herzog movie, and festival acquisitions as well. So it feels a little bit like, and I think the pandemic is the reason why, but I wonder if a change has been made now. Because it used to be that there were movies on these streaming services, but they were not great.

Mostly they were kind of the, the it's like that story about Quibi that I think we talked about briefly that the Quibi, the story is that they got everybody's rejected ideas pitched to them. Like nobody pitched their a level ideas to Quibi, but they had stuff that got rejected and they're like, all right, well, how about Quibi?

And Quibi's like, yes, please. That's great. You're a star. We'll do this idea. And it's like, yeah, this is the idea no one liked. But great. Pay me. I feel like maybe streaming movies in general, and I'm not saying there weren't good streaming movies, but that a lot of them was sort of like it was B-list, C-list stuff where it was maybe it was, or maybe it was just an idea that people didn't like. And I rare, it was very rare that I saw a movie on streaming, an original film that

I thought was good. Not that it didn't happen, but it was really rare. And during the pandemic, they brought a bunch of movies sort of out of theaters and onto streaming. And I've found more movies that I've watched and enjoyed. I've watched and enjoyed. I probably watched and enjoyed original streaming movies more in the last two months than ever before put together. And it makes me think you got to keep this up, right? Like this works. Like having good movies on streaming works. And I know that there's the theater and there's the potential that at some point the theaters are going to come back and they're going to have a market to them.

But it feels like this is a good approach and that they should do more of these. And they don't all have to even be expensive blockbusters. I really loved Andy Samberg's movie Palm Springs, which is on Hulu. They bought it at Sundance Film Festival and it got released in like, I don't know, drive-ins or something. But basically its whole release was on Hulu. And it was cheap. It was like $5 million supposedly to make it. And it was really good and fun. And I would say there's more variety you can do with streaming movies.

They don't all have to be huge blockbusters. But you can have a variety of movies that have a broader appeal and that maybe are in your A-list and your better B-list ideas. And Greyhound was good, but again, Greyhound was going to be in theaters and then it was on Apple TV. So I think Apple doing this is great. They should do more of it. And I would like to see more movies on streaming in general from all the services that don't feel like they're the ones that weren't good enough to be in the theater. I would say like you mentioned Palm Springs. I haven't seen that yet. We're going to watch it soon, but I watched the Eurovision movie this weekend, the Will Ferrell Eurovision movie. Right. Similar, like that was a good movie. I enjoyed it. Like I

had fun. Like it didn't feel like the streaming service movie as you're mentioning. Right. Right. So like, you know, it's like a similar thing for me. Get good people, have them make good movies, and make the movies that they want to make, not the movies that nobody else would buy. But this whole approach, if you're going to do it, now is the time to do it. Because there are movies out there that you can buy,

and if you can do it and make a big enough impact, and everyone makes a ton of money, you will change what it means to release a big movie right like this is you've got to imagine for the netflix's the amazon's the apples of the world this is like blood in the water time yep for the movie this is the time to spring because the theaters are we've had so much that's been dictated by tradition. Like, well, the theaters. And now there's this added level of risk for any gauge of theatrical release, right?

Like even if you say, well, the US is bad now, but the rest of the world is getting better and all that. The pandemic puts a layer on top of all of your guesses about what the future of theatrical release is going to be. And as an executive making movies, you've got to make a calculation about where you can maximize the profit. And having risk be part of that calculation, you've got to look at it and be like, wow, do we really want to put... I would imagine those executives are thinking, one, are there movies that we should pull and just put on streaming if we can sell them, especially if the streaming services will pay us or if it's our streaming service and we gauge it to be worth it.

And second, I, if you're like Marvel, do you look at this and say, why don't we change the balance here and make fewer movies that are destined for the theater and lean more into the Disney plus stuff? make fewer movies that are destined for the theater and lean more into the disney plus stuff because that's a good hedge against the box office because even if theaters come back box office may not come back people may not want to go to a movie theater at the levels that they used

to for a while if ever so uh yeah i think it's an interesting time. And if you're Apple or Netflix or anybody who has money to spend on this kind of content, do you overpay a little bit in order to just take the lunch of the movie theaters and change everybody's minds about watching movies on streaming to the point where you can deal like almost a death blow to movie theaters. I mean, you can't kill, I don't think any of them are going to kill them, but they could hurt them. They could hurt them and they could really change the public's perception of movies at home. Because for a lot of movies, it's a really nice experience to watch them at home. And I think people are learning that even more now so i don't know it's it's maybe it may be a risk worth taking and i wonder you know there are a

couple of movies out there now that are getting like indefinite delays and like i wonder could apple convince nolan to give them tenant it seems incredibly unlikely because you know that he really wants the imax christopher nolan wants things like in imax and on film right so that seems like it's it's almost an impossible thing but there are there might be others out there i'm still baffled that uh so so um disney has a movie that was developed at fox called new mutants which is an x-men movie it's essentially the last x-men movie made at fox and now they've been sort of sucked into Marvel. That movie has been delayed and reshot and delayed and delayed and delayed. I don't know why they haven't just put it on Hulu.

I really don't. They can't put it on Disney Plus. I think if it's not an R, it's a really hard PG-13. It's a horror movie, kind of superhero horror movie. But that's the one that kind of baffles me because it's like they did it with Hamilton. a horror movie kind of superhero horror movie but that's the one that kind of baffles me because it's like they did it with hamilton's like i know this is a superhero movie but first off it's not really a movie that anybody is dying to see and it's from the studio you bought and isn't there anymore essentially um so i'm surprised that that something like that hasn't happened yet but you are i think the longer this goes goes and the longer the people in the do you want your movie to not be seen like what is the length of time you're willing to go will you go six months will you go a year i think christopher nolan will say we'll wait a year if we have to yeah i do think that he will say that

but then i wonder about james bond yep that's a big movie that exists out in the world delayed someone's gonna want and like you can't keep pushing that james bond rock like rock up the hill for too long like because you know i think they've they've typically done well but like has been you know the james bond series has been mired in financial controversy for years now that probably cost a lot of money to make and it just sitting there is not good and you could have an apple roll in and be like you know we'll give you x amount of money and give us it and i wouldn't be surprised to see james bond go somewhere honestly um because weird strange times but sure i mean i i you and i have advocated here for that's a possibility to just buy James Bond, right? Like Apple. Yeah.

Yeah. Buy the license. Buy MGM and Eon and just make James Bond into an Apple property or something. Like, I don't know. I mean, and again, the finances here are complicated because movie box office is a huge part of the financial calculation of spending money to make any movie that's intended for theaters. You get your home video, but you also get your initial run box office. And the other way to go, we should say, is not to put it on your streaming service. You put it on

your streaming service as a way to build your subscriber base because over the long run, you make money because those people are paying you every month or every year. The other way to go is to do pay-per-view, which they did with like Trolls World Tour, I think, was done that way. And the idea there is you rent the movie using the existing rental channels, but those initial run movies are super expensive. Think about how much a family of four would spend going to a movie theater. That might be $30, $40.

So you put the movie on rental for $30 or $ 25 bucks and you're like $25 rental is ridiculous. But it's also sort of like, well, yeah, but it's the brand new movie everybody wants to see. And then eventually it'll be available somewhere else, but not for did, which is say, we're going to put Hamilton on our streaming service. And in the end, it's going to be worth it because it gets people to try Disney Plus. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by Fully. Fully's workplace furniture is designed for health, flow, and balance. During these uncertain times, Fully is helping people and businesses

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kind of grow in you you know like i was working in bad environment like in bad like ergonomic issues take time to kind of grow in you. You know, like I was working in bad environment, like in bad, like ergonomic environments for a while. And I was like, oh, this is fine. I can work from the sofa. Like when I started working from home and it took like six months and I was like, oh no, this is bad.

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That's F-U-L-L-Y dot com slash upgrade. Fully, everything you need to find your workflow. Our thanks to Fully for their support of this show and all of RelayFM. Summer of fun! Summer of fun! Go on, Stephen, do it. Summer of fun!

Stephen Hackett is joining us today. We're doing more macOS content so last episode we judged and evaluated the changes in the system sounds this time we're going to be judging and evaluating the new system icons

in macOS Big Sur perfect, perfect for a podcast like last week, perfect sound on a podcast. And this week, images. Yeah, not so easy. I'll put links in the show notes. Check your chapter art, everybody.

Yeah, I'll put links in the show notes too if you want to get them at a higher resolution so you can really zoom in and see these icons in all of their glory. But we've put those together. So if you do take a look, you'll see we have the new icons on the left and the icons that they are replacing on the right. So I think, Jason, you put this together for us today, didn't you? I spent some time in Photoshop this morning.

So we're going to have all of those for you in case you want to see them. And of course, this is going to be draft style. So of course, this is going to be draft style. Of course. Four rounds. First of good icons, then bad icons. Oh, a couple of rules because there's always rules. These icons, the only icons we're picking from must be on a stock install of macOS Big Sur.

No new icons for iWork and i life they don't count because i think we found out this morning that they actually are not in the current version of mac os is that right that's right they're not there yet also there's this is one of those drafts where you can't win it's just we're assembling a what i demand prizes you win a moral victory You win moral victory for making the best arguments. I'll take that. That's enough for me. Okay. As guests, Stephen, you can feel free to pick first. Okay.

Starting with the good ones now. And we should clarify, we're looking at the applications folder and the utilities folder. Right. So not stuff in core services or other places. No. I spent a long time this morning getting all the applications icons ready to go, and then Stephen said, wow, you should check out the utilities folder. And I was like, oh, no.

So, yeah, it's both. We got both. Got both. So I'm going to go with my first good pick as Automator. Oh, yeah, okay. So the previous version had Otto, the little automation robot with one eye. He didn't have a background, just on a clear, transparent, floating in space. He's in a formless white void, yes.

Yes. Transparent void. He was in Johnny Ive's room, but Johnny Ive rage quit. Room's available. He took the room with him. That's the thing uh and so now otto is standing on what looks like some sort of uh floor with concentric circles coming out from his feet maybe they're ripples of automation that's how i think about it so like you know the power of automation rippling out from his feet and And I think it looks fantastic because we get some more depth,

like he's standing on this floor. It looks really nice. And they do a nice gradient. So the top right-hand corner of the icon sort of fades to white. Yeah, Automator, my first pick. I like this pick. I thought about putting this on my list.

I couldn't help but think also that when Apple finally decides that it's not going to support Automator and AppleScript and macOS anymore, that's a trap door oh no no jason yeah and it's like it's a it's it opens up from the center right and then he just falls in like at first he tries to use his little pipe to hold on that's right because he won't fit through the first one the pipe will save him but then they just keep dropping the wider circles until he's gone.

Well, that was fun. Well, for a minute. And then you brought robot murder into it. Yeah, I did. I did. Okay, it's my choice now, isn't it? I'm going to go with calculator. Oh, that's a good pick. Okay, so here, follow me here. The new calculator looks a little bit like. Oh, yeah. Pick. Okay.

So here, follow me here. The new calculator looks a little bit like a cookie. I will admit it's a little cookie that's been decorated by a small child with little M&Ms on it. I'm selling it so far. Yeah. Sounds great. But the point here is what came before, because the old calculator icon is a travesty. It looks like a napkin with calculator printed on it.

It's just this thin flimsy thing, or it looks like literally a screenshot that was turned at an angle. And somebody was like, yeah, that's good enough. That's a calculator. It does have pie on it, which is okay. But like the new one is like a little cute calculator widget and it's adorable. And the old one is super dumb and I hate it.

And every time I look at it, I get angry. And that's why I use pCalc is what I'm saying. So I pick the new calculator. It's a cookie. It's adorable. You can pick those M&Ms off. Are you sure it's not cake, Jason? Are we sure that this isn't cake, this one?

I think it might be cake. I think we found the cake. It's this one. Cakeulator. Thin crispy cake that It's this one. Cake-ulator. Thin crispy cake that we call a cookie. Or a biscuit. In some places. This was on my bad list. You prefer that old garbage calculator icon?

I think the new one is even worse than the bad one from before. I agree with you. The one before is flimsy and kind of lame. I really don't like the new one I'm sorry it looks like a toy it is a toy I think the new one is worse than the old one

have you used Apple's calculator app it is a toy that's hard to argue with I'm going to upset everybody with my first pick I think mail boo Mike this is on my list of good apps icons too, so don't feel bad. Why is there such a prominent eagle in the email application?

Yep. That was my entire rationale is a stamp with a giant eagle. Wait, is that what the E in email stands for? Is it actually eagle mail? Did we finally find out? An eagle. well well it's scleromorphic mike because in the past in america because of our wide open spaces the mail was delivered by the mighty american eagle only the u.s postal service other other groups could do other things but the u.s postal service used eagles and that was the origin of email oh honestly for a minute there i was completely on board i thought you were telling me the truth about the way that mail was delivered in america because i wouldn't know like i just i

look i have a problem in general with uh this weird like and especially thinking of like younger people you know like how we use the floppy disk icon for save and right like i don't know why email is representative of an envelope and it still is and there's nothing better we could do but an envelope icon for email is way better than just a stamp i like i agree i don't like the eagle i don't love the mail icon i don't really love the weird kind of depth and the fact that they've written this very very small return address on the back that looks like a mistake unless you look very very close i don't like any of those things about it and i do think that um what we really should have is something like a you know inappropriate

reply all button or something on there to represent the entire genre of email that's or a spam message maybe like a uh you know i don't know the spam message of the moment you can come up with something but um but i do agree that in looking at this next to the old one it's like oh yeah this maybe like a, you know, I don't know the spam message of the moment. You can come up with something, but, but I do agree that in looking at this next to the old one, it's like, oh yeah, this is a lot better than the giant Eagle stamp.

Sorry, fans of the classic email system from the 1800s. Also, I might tip my hand a little bit to some future picks, but I am a big fan of the visual consistency of icons between mac os and ios i think that that what apple's doing here is a good thing in like you know we're trying to unify some of the iconography a little bit and so i think changing this email icon to the an actual what we consider quote-unquote email icon is better.

Like, there are so many email apps that use envelopes or paper planes, right? None of them use an Eagle stamp. So it's time to move away from the Eagle stamp. Wow. I like to think that my email is majestic and signifies freedom, but whatever. Let's just put an American flag on that envelope, Stephen. That's a stamp on the other side. USA.

This is a weird time to be proud. I'm just going to say. Oh, yeah. All right. Moving on, Stephen. My second good icon. I'm going to go to the utilities folder, and I'm going to pick color sync utility. Okay.

So the, the main part of the artwork is the same. It's a little wrench and a flathead screwdriver, and it's got the C color sync logo sort of in the middle, but they've shrunk it down and put it on, like Mike, you said this consistent round wreck background. And now that round wrecked background has a gradient to it.

And the gradient matches up with the color inside the sea. That's nice. I think it's really nice looking. A lot of color. It's pretty. Color sync utility. It's my second choice. And I'm very happy with it.

In a world full of, to look ahead to our bad selections, in a world full of nondescript white icon round wrecks, they didn't do that here. They're like, oh, it's color. It should be colorful. And they made it this delightfully rainbowy kind of thing. And I agree. I like this one a lot. It's a party in an icon.

It's a party for your eyes. Yeah. And that's what you want from ColorSync Ut sync utility an app that almost nobody will ever open what does it do color sync it's like color management it will make your like color profiles for your monitors and your printers and things and make sure that they all it's important technology for people in professional publishing is it like that stuff i always used to see advertised in like mac world where you would put this little thing on your display and it would try and calibrate the color. Yeah.

Yes. Apple even had a bunch of displays with color sync in the name where they like did it from the factory and it didn't move. And of course it did, which is why those products existed. But again, most people don't ever open this.

Most people don't know what it is. But I like that someone took the time to make the icon all colorful and bright all right speaking of apps no one will ever use stickies is my choice for a nice car a nice icon in uh in big sir um the new stickies icon is a stack of sticky notes with rounded rectangles but it also looks like a stack which i really like i actually would love a a stack of rounded rectangle sticky notes i think it looks really cool written on it in uh with some sort of a marker are the to-do items milk eggs and bread i'd like to think that that's a reference to uh remember the milk one of

the great steven hackett apps of history i want to know what happened to Lou. This is, so, okay, Mike, Mike, don't jump ahead here. The old icon had eggs and milk, but no bread, and a phone number for Lou. I am sorry to report Lou passed away. No! And so, rest in peace, Lou. Oh my God. Don't call 555-7361.

He's not there anymore. Anyway, in honor of Lou, the new Stickies icon is my choice. Is bread? That's the honor? Lou liked bread. Maybe Lou was a baker. They needed some bread for the funeral. Oh, Jason.

Jason. Sorry, Lou. We love you. Dead bodies get crusty. No, they just put out a spread at at the wake and there's bread and eggs and milk there stop we're done i i like the stickies one too uh stickies is one of those applications that every year i think it's the year that it's gonna go but it survived it doesn't go the move to os 10 survived 64 bit now it has here it is in big sur i opened opened it in Big Sur to look at it just to see if anything had changed at all or if it still feels incredibly old, which the answer is it does.

And I had that thought, which is, you know, why don't they get an intern or something to add? Because people use stickies. They do. They use stickies instead of notes, which I think is weird. they do they use stickies instead of notes which i think is weird but it's like okay well then have an intern like add icloud support to stickies or something so that you could like sync your stickies across your devices and like make a modern version of stick you know what stickies would be good for now a widget on ios little stickies right like so i understand why people use stickies because it has some good functionality like the always on top right you know like if it

still has that i mean so it used to i used to use it for myself because you could it would effectively work as this different layer to the rest of the system right so it's a pretty much like a sticky note always in your face so you know it's good for that uh i'm happy that it exists but i agree i think it's not a big opportunity for someone, right? Or a big opportunity for Apple. But there is something that they could do with this, which is Myst. Or they could add that functionality to Notes. But I think it's telling that Stickies just continues to push along.

And I know people do use it. And maybe get Luda updated. I think Stickies is one of those applications that apple might be like scared to remove right because they know like there'll be like a really strong vocal minority of people that would get oh yeah there's gonna be you know there's gonna be a verge article by somebody on the staff at the verge who's like i use stickies every day to track all of my articles and now apple is ruined it's a disaster a disaster! I lost my most recent draft because Apple removed stickies. The outline would have written that article,

but unfortunately I don't think they're around anymore. Is the outline still around? No. No? Okay. I don't think so. If they are, they fired their staff, but yeah, they're basically not around. Mike, what's your...

See, I'm glad that this is the positive part, everybody. This is the positive part of the draft. Mike, what's your next good icon selection? Messages. Similar to my original argument for mail. What I like about messages is that it's the same application on iOS and finally has the same icon. I'm not really sure why messages stuck around with its name as messages,

but had the blue icon with the other little dot dot dot icon which some could argue is maybe a better icon for messages overall because green is funny because green is the green bubble friend but nevertheless uh i am happy that messages is now consistent but i actually also just do like the messages icon on big sir i like the shading that they've done to it to make it really kind of stand out so i'm a big fan of the messages icon i don't know whether i should list all the reasons why i hate the messages icon here or just save it for the bad draft do it save it for the bad part save it if you're gonna put it in your bad list then save it for the bad part if you're not gonna put it in your bad list then save it for the bad part if you're

not gonna put it in your bad list then do it now i'll save it all right wow yeah a little teaser for what's to come i feel strongly about that one so yes okay uh back to steven back to me i am gonna go with image capture as my next good pick it retained the digital camera it looks like the same digital camera as before but before it was sitting on these black and white photos it's like which doesn't make any sense because you're scanning them it kind of looks like is it like are they emerging from it is it like a secret Polaroid? What is happening there? Oh, yeah. And I think most people use image capture to scan as opposed to inserting an SD card and pulling things off. So the new one does a couple things. A, it uses the round rect, but smaller in the background.

It has a grid of images with a red one circled as if you were looking at a sheet of negatives or something that you were scanning maybe. And the camera is still there and it breaks out of the round direct a little bit. So it keeps its slightly unusual shape. But I think it looks really nice. I really like what they did with it. And I'm glad that image capture is still around because I scan stuff all the time. I use image capture pretty frequently.

And I'm glad that it looks a little better now. I i mean the app still looks bad like the app didn't change any but it's got this fancy new icon and i like the detail on this one a lot this was on my list there's something i do not like about image capture which is the little red circle around one of the images what's how you would like mark up a. Like, oh, I want this one in the newspaper today. Right, but you were saying that this is good because it shows what it actually is rather than pretending to be something it's not, which is printing.

So you wouldn't draw on your screen, you know? Like, this is the one I want. Don't like it. I don't know. It's the metaphor of it because you're selecting one and then you can import that one using image capture. This was on my list, Stephen.

I agree with you. I thought this was a really good – not only is the new one pretty good, but the old one, the longer you look at it, the more questions you have about what's happening. What I do like about this icon – I don't dislike this icon i find the red part weird but i what i like about this icon is something i like about a lot of the big sir icons is that they have the rounded rectangle but don't necessarily stay inside of it i think that that's quite a nice touch for a lot of these where there is the round rack and then there is some familiar part of it which pokes out a little bit so like i don't know if we mentioned this for automator but otto's head kind of point like pokes out at the top of the round right there too. So I like that where it's like, we have this rounded rectangle. Some apps for some reason stay inside it too much, but a lot of them pop out of the rounded rectangle with some kind of fun element. So that's, that is one of my favorite

things about some of the icons in Pixar. And that keeps it Mac-like, where you have icons of any shape, really. And so it does keep it Mac-like while bringing it mostly in line with iOS. So yeah, I like that too. I think they've had a nice distinction there in this new design. All right, I'm going to make what apparently

is a somewhat controversial choice but i have to make it which is music i'm gonna choose the music app come on and here's here's why yeah yeah i know i hear you and here's what i say the world is full of stupid neutral background icons i can't tell one icon from another now i know i can look at the red icon with the big musical note in it and I have my music app. Whereas before it's like, oh, which of the long list of white background or light gray gradient background icons can I choose?

Oh, there's this one that's got the musical note with the super weird color gradient. And yes, I can see those colors. Be gone, be gone. Very simple, clear outline of the musical note uh red background instead of being confused with all the other white backgrounds i like it i'm very happy that apple has finally given us the what essentially is the ios 9 icon for music uh back and now it's on the mac too it's great i will save my points about this icon

for a little bit later on i see what you're doing it's fair it's fair is it my turn now it it is text edit do you know why i'm picking text edit it has an incredibly detailed mechanical pencil on the icon it does i was going to ask you separately about to comic because there are two there's a mechanical pencil for text edit and there's a pen on the script editor utility. And I definitely want your thoughts about these devices. It didn't really change much, Mike. I mean, it's a little bit bigger. But I feel like out of all the icons, this one isn't a huge change. Why the pencil now?

Well, I wanted to just say uh jason it's a mechanical pencil on both it's just a different color oh is it yeah oh i thought it was a pen oh is it the same one is dark gray yeah so what i'll say is i will i can tell you like definitely yes the mechanical pencil is basically the same from the from version to version but it has the same thing that i like about some of the other icons where it's taken i think a nice interpretation of a lined piece of paper and made that the rounded wreck and then the pencil kind of sticks out from uh the top and bottom so i like the way that this icon looks i think it's not a huge difference but an improvement that i like but i

also just wanted to talk about the mechanical pencil a little bit that is featured on both of these icons because I have some good points and I have some questions that I would love somebody to answer. There's no rule against it, Stephen. We have to let him do this. Yep. So the grip is really cool. Clearly, the pen is made out of some kind of metal.

I'm just going to assume aluminum because it probably makes the most sense here, although it's quite shiny. Shiny. It could potentially be something like steel or titanium titanium but it also could just be really nicely polished aluminium so you know that's up to up to them really what i do like is it has a knurled grip so you know it has those little bumps you can see the little bumps if you zoom in that's called knurling when that when it sticks out like that i also really like the little detail of the

stripes the kind of strips like the knurled strips that go down to the end. That would actually be very comfortable to hold. I like that the one on Script Editor is black. Potentially that is DLC coated, like what they did to the Apple Watch. That's my own mental model for that one because it looks pretty nice. But the question I have is that this looks like it would be a 0.7 pencil lead, which is a bold choice. That is quite a thick pencil lead that they've done there. It wouldn't be very good for writing. So, you know, either for the scribble that they did in script editing or for the text they're about to write on text edit, it would be quite

chunky for a pencil. It's not necessarily what I would recommend. I would say maybe 0.3 or 0.5 would have been a much better choice. Are you boys still here, or did you leave? Jason, did you go for tea? I'm regretting my choices, but I actually do have an important note here that I want to mention, Mike, which is if you look where the clip is compared to where the knurling is, you can see that Apple is cheating here.

They've shrunk the length of this pencil a lot between the old version and the new version. This is a stubby mechanical pencil while the old one was a more traditionally sized, I would say, pencil. Do you have a problem with that? Or do these exist? Or are they just cheating here?

No, because what they've done, they've made it smaller, which is fine, right? It's fine to have a smaller pencil. But they've retained the ergonomics. They've kept the grip section the same size, so it would still be comfortable to hold in the hand. I can't believe I had a follow-up question about the pencil, but I did.

There it was. So text edit. Okay, Stephen, you got one more good icon pick. What is it? I've been sitting here thinking a lot about this when Mike was talking. And I am going to go go i think it could be kind of between two one that's controversial and one that's maybe not as controversial so which

way i'm going to give you all the choice should i go should i create controversy or should i play nice controversy yeah i think the new preview icon is pretty sweet it's on my list too steven i don't think that's controversial at all i i think there were some tweets and stuff when this first showed up that people didn't like the side view of the looking glass a little magnification glass but i really like it because if you if you zoom into it Apple distorts the image really nicely under it and previously they were just zooming in so you could see the corner of the photo better

it's one photo, it's another example of a round rack with an item in front of it and I tend to like that style, I like the boot camp one too, it's a similar type layout but I like the new preview icon, I like the detail in it, I like also boot camp one too. It's a similar type layout. But I like the new preview icon. I like the detail in it.

I like also that it looks like the same photo as in the old icon. So they've brought that history along with it. But again, have modernized it a bit for Big Sur. I don't know. I like it. But I got a feeling some people don't. I like it. I like the loop that they're using there.

It does look a little more like a, I don't know, like an upside down shot glass or that they're using there. It does look a little more like a, I don't know, like an upside down shot glass or something than the old loop, which was more cylindrical. This one kind of is tapered, but that's a perfectly valid style for a loop to zoom in on something. I agree with you. I've been using, so on my laptop that I've been using with Big Sur, I've had PDFs open in preview. And every time I look at the icon, I'm like, oh, preview, you're different now. But I like you. I like it. Having lived with it, I think it's good. I think it's simpler without losing any of the sort of flavor that was there in the old one. And a stack of photos, again, having that photo be in the round rect with a border,

which is adorable, I think it's good. Yeah. All right. I feel like this is turning into bad icons in the last version and then bad icons in the next version. But you know, that's what improvement is. It's improving on something that was bad before.

Uh, and so my choices now are, I could go to just sort of general positivity or I could just, I'm going to slag off a bad old icon that's been put away and that's the bluetooth file exchange icon um i don't know if anybody has looked in the utilities folder at the bluetooth file exchange icon but that is some bluetooth logo it's huge it's white with a blue uh like bevel or stroke applied to it that's kind of uh a gradient to it's darker on the bottom than the top it it looks like a space invader or something it's coming to get you it's on a you know square that has been put in a perspective so it's sort of sitting there

it is i looked at it for a while for this segment and i thought um i every second i looked at it i hated it more and more and the new one is so restrained it's still the same it's literally the same bluetooth logo they didn't change the bluetooth logo but the edges of it are curved now not sharp you could point you know you can put an eye out with that thing they're curved and they're just on a little pleasant blue round rect so blue for for Bluetooth. That's great. It's just, it's restrained. It's subtle. It's nice.

And the old one is terrible. So I think just in the net benefit of the new Bluetooth file exchange icon, another app that almost nobody's ever, ever, ever going to use. But thumbs up to the icon designer who smoothed out that awful Bluetooth logo and made it look decent. The old one looks like it was an icon and the back of it fell off. Like the Bluetooth is still upright, but the color fell back and there's like a shadow behind it. That's the lore of the new one. They just fixed it.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, they pushed it back. Well, yeah, but they smoothed off. They took some sandpaper and they smoothed off the edge. There was some damage. That Bluetooth icon is so sharp in the old one that that's like a weapon that a Klingon would use or something. It's very dangerous.

So don't, don't. Just don't upgrade. You just, just the safety alone of upgrading to Big Sur that you won't hurt yourself on the Bluetooth file exchange icon. It might be enough to upgrade just there. I'm not really sure why the Bluetooth logo looks like that. Like, why isn't it a tooth, right? It's a bee.

Well, it's a stylized bee. Yeah, but it's called Bluetooth. It should have been a tooth. If you turn it 90 degrees clockwise, it kind of looks like pointy teeth, maybe. No. That's King Bluetooth's teeth. That's not enough for me. Some New Year's Eve, we should all get little, you know those glasses that were like for

2001 and 2009 and all that? We should get some Bluetooth glasses. For like the birthday of Bluetooth. And be like, yay, happy New Year, Bluetooth. Happy Bluetooth. Maybe on like an anniversary of the Bluetooth creation. Sure. Little cardboard glasses.

We'll text each other things using Bluetooth file exchange. It'll be great. I'm going to pick a weird one now, I think. Or at least one that most people would find boring, but I think is really good. Launchpad. Mm-mm. Nope. What is the old Launchpad logo or icon all about?

It's a rocket. It's a rocket. All right. So do you use that application to take off into space? Use it to apps. No. Launching is itself a metaphor for, like, your apps are going into space. I don't know, but that's the metaphor.

It's Launchpad. Launchpad is where the rockets launch off from. Yeah, but that rocket's not on the Launchpad. That Launchpad was a long time ago for that rocket. Yeah, just like when you launch an app, the launch pad fades away, the rocket has pulled away from it. The new launch pad makes so much more sense, because you know what it looks like?

A grid of app icons, and that's what you want it to be. Yes, you know what the Apple's operating systems need most of all is a white background with a series of rainbow shapes on it. There are less white backgrounds now. You just said that.

No, there's less white backgrounds now. It's like how you loved your terrible music icon because it got rid of the white background. There's some whimsy in the metaphor that they've lost here. I see what your point. The new one fits, I think, much better. But it's on my bad list. Especially because launchpad is surely going to become more important i would expect like in the future with the uh like it might actually not more important important it was never important there you go i think it might become important with the uh with a lot of the

changes that are coming to like with apple silicon and launching ios apps on the mac like it could make more sense to do something with that maybe to like make it better um i think it's a better icon for what it is than launchpad was which i think has been that has been consistent across my picks here is with the exclusion of text edits because i wanted to talk about mechanical pencil for a couple of minutes because as i said at the beginning what i like about the changes to many of these icons is that they are adding more consistency to people moving from device to device for where consistency is needed so mail and messages they look like the mail and messages apps that you know launchpad is like oh that's where I get the apps from,

not this is where I set off a rocket from. It's literally, it's very similar to the home screen icon that shows when you do command tab switching on the iPad. It is, yeah. That's a four by four and not a three by three, but they're very similar. Therefore, proving what I'm trying to say, which is like visual consistency makes sense when so much of the operating system

is visual consistency anyway. So a thumbs up for me for Launchpad. We can't stop you. Sorry, everybody, I guess. Upgradians, if you no longer want to hear any ads on this show like this ad while also getting extra content, you should sign up

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Thank you so much for checking it out, getupgradeplus.com. All right. Bad icon time. Bad icon time. Bad icon time. So what is the idea behind bad icons? It's things that have gotten worse. Could it be just things we hate in general?

Yeah. What is the situation here? What's the rules? Whatever you want it to mean. I think the last one was sort of motivated by improvements versus the last one. And this one is going to be more on the balance of either it was bad and it stayed bad, or more likely it got worse is sort of what I'm thinking. Okay. I feel like overall the utilities folder got bigger hits.

Like there are more bad ones in utilities than in the applications folder. And that's where i'm going to start and i'm going to start with keychain access like color seek utility it's the same artwork as before but now it's in a round red background and i looked at this background for like 20 minutes trying to work out what it is and what i think it is it's a garage it's a it's the roll no i have something even more specific it's like the rolling door on a self-storage unit. Ah. And it's all your keys.

Oh, that's even better then. I don't keep my passwords in a self-storage unit. I don't want to keep them there. But what you kind of do, though, if you think about it, it's a storage unit just for yourself. Like a bed? Like an office? I mean, I don't know.

I don't like it. The orange is weird, and I like orange. I just... I wish they had just done something a little bit simpler here. I... Yeah, I don't entirely agree because I do like that background. I do... I had

the same question as you about why it's textured the way it is, but they have to add some sort of skeuomorphism. However, I will say, just like you said about Automator, I think the trend to take these old mac os 10 icons from the ancient days when it was mac os 10 and put them on backgrounds put them on round wrecks i kind of like the trend because you look at some of these icons long enough and you're like it's just keys floating in space and now it's sort of keys in front of uh you know a texture and a slightly blurry texture i feel a little less uh disconnected and like floating in a void and that makes me feel better so um but but

i i get your point that that that texture is maybe questionable um i actually was going to use your pick as an example of a better option than my pick which is disk utility where can i begin with disk utility uh let's let's begin with what they did to it they they they did redraw the stethoscope because let's remember the disk utility icon is a metal hard drive with a stethoscope attached to it so you can listen and see if it's got, you know, breathing problems, I guess.

I don't know. Or if it's pulse is fine. But that's the metaphor and we'll go with it. What did they do? Well, they did redraw it. So the, the little tube that comes out of the, the stethoscope goes in a different direction.

But although I will give them that, they just slapped it on a on a white background with a metal embossed outline it is it just seems so i mean it seems a little lazy and it also seems like they bypassed an opportunity to do anything to make this icon more interesting because first off when it's small it's really hard to scan the hard drive is not something most people even see and uh they don't put them in most of their computers now and uh and in the new one the stethoscope is posed dead center or slightly off center in the in the round rect which makes it look more like i I don't know, a stethoscope, like a health app. I don't know what they're doing here.

And if I were their teacher, I would send them back. I would put a see me on the paper and I'd be like, you need to do a better job. You need to do better work. This isn't going to cut it. I need to see a little more creativity out of you. I would like to provide some real-time follow-up from the RelayFM members Discord. real-time follow-up from the RelayFM members' Discord. So the background of the keychain icon is actually the texture from the padlock

that appears when you're entering. Like, you know, you see the padlock for passwords in macOS? That's actually a textured background. The lock itself has that kind of orange texture. So if you zoomed in far enough on like, or like the lock itself has that kind of like orange texture. So if you zoomed in far enough on that, you would actually see this exact icon. So I love it more. Wait, so the keys are really tiny

compared to the lock they go into? I have more questions now. Yeah, I mean, that's currently the case if you look at any of the, like, so the key chain, when you're adding something to the key chain, the keys are tiny against the lock, like really minuscule keys.

Okay. I just wanted to say that our members of the Discord are also theorizing what sort of medical device that disk utility round rack could be. Stop. It's none of them. This is not operation. It is not a tray that you put organs in or something. It's not. It's just a bad icon.

Okay, go ahead mike music the music icon is the new one is mind-numbingly boring it is one of the most boring app icons on the mac now completely what did they do they just made a red icon and put and cut a music note out of the middle of it like the music app has a visual like gradient the old one the blue to pink why didn't they at least do the blue to pink why is it just all pink it's so boring it's really boring like i would say the the worst applicate the worst icons in macOS are the ones where they made them boring. I have one that I'm going to pick shortly. This is one of the worst offenders. They did it to iOS, they did it to macOS. Like, Apple Music is a brand of its own. And for some reason, they've decided

our brand is pink now. Like, I don't get it. it like having a gradient to it was so much nicer if you're gonna have like they've regressed it so many years it's so boring i hate this icon it's boring and i don't like it you know what i like when i when i'm listening to music is i like finding the app in order to launch it and then being entertained by the music instead of the icon boom okay steven go ahead i don't know how the i that argument you just made it's like it's good it's the best one it's a good argument no no it's so clear that it doesn't even need to be an argument it's destroyed whatever your thing is about being entertained by an icon then the entire point of this draft is in question like if what we're doing is just i'm not entertained

by disc utility well then we may as well just have all icons just be the name of a thing so like you know like this utility icon should just say disc on it yeah great let's do that that's not a good icon is it all right i am going for now to stay in the utilities folder. And I want to talk about audio MIDI setup. The old icon is basically a square keyboard with a little drop shadow. The new one is perhaps the laziest redesign in the entirety of Big Sur. They put a cookie cutter of the new round rect, clipped the edges of the keyboard to the point where if you zoom in,

the white keys on the outer side touch the edge of the round rect. What they should have done is done, they could do this, but shrink all the artwork down a little bit. So they kept a black border around it. This is one that someone took eight seconds to do and then moved on. You know what?

I've zoomed in on it quite a lot. Enhance. And what I think makes it worse is it does look like it has been redrawn like if you look at the little window like the little like readout screen on the inside they've changed the shadow on it the sliders on the left have changed so that kind of makes it worse that somebody did spend time on this but the piano keys touch the edges of the icon. That's not good. That is worse. I didn't want to zoom too closely into it because I didn't want to accidentally punch my display. Ah, okay. Face melt off.

But it's bad. All right, for my pick, I'm going to get a little conceptual here. I'm picking all of the icons that put a round peg in a square hole specifically siri safari and time machine as examples where you have a concept that is round the original concept is something that is round and then somebody in your you're an icon designer and you're like i got the round icons down we're good we got round icons and then somebody's like guess what round rex we're going to do that now now everything is a squared circle uh go and you're like but time machine is a circle that moves in a circle but the safari is a compass they don't make square compasses uh but you know siri we have in fact we have the little siri circle and in ios 14 when you

activate siri you just see the little circle doesn't matter put it in a square and so you've got a series of of these just like really bad icons that are meant to be circles and now they're circles inside squares and it's just it's just really sad because this is the the the downside of having this concept is is you have things that were naturally circles and all they can really do you can you can see it look at safari and siri you can you can see the designer be like all right i guess i'll just shrink it down and then put a thing behind it and then i mean job's done you can knock off early and go home you probably they were probably already at home um anyway i don't like it i think i think it's a mistake to to i get the

consistency part but it just makes these icons seem sad it is weird like again like i know like safari now looks like the ios icon which i said i'm happy with i'm happy in most instances with that but it's strange to see which applications got to do something fun and which didn't like in my mind the little safari compass should live in the bottom right hand corner and it be in front of something else right like the round rack could be something that looks like a web page or something like that right like it's peculiar to drop some of those things in the way that they are and then some applications like image capture

really get to break the boundaries when Safari is arguably without actually no, Safari is a much more important application which people will see and click on more often. I get the consistency with iOS but I look at it and I think, okay,

you probably don't want to make a square compass wheel right because it's a circular item but you could i mean am i wrong and saying maybe it should be a little skeuomorphic maybe the safari icon if it has to be in a round rect maybe the idea is that the round rect is like the the thing that the compass wheel goes in and it's part of the physical object but here it's just on a white to gray gradient and it's laying there with with nothing like it doesn't even have uh like a shadow or anything it's got maybe a very little very light stroke around it um extremely subtle it could have been cool to make it look like a compass right like that's the part you

hold on to or something yeah right but they didn't do that they just took the this is they punted on this one and they basically said we'll just make it like it is an ios and i think if they're if the goal here is to have these i mean they said in their pr richer icons to take advantage of the mac i think they missed an opportunity with a lot of these where they just took a circle and put it on a square and called it good and it i i think they're i i despise all of them just because I think they need to try harder. System preferences. Now, this is a weird one.

My problem here, so this is, I actually, all right, follow me here. I actually like the system preferences icon. The new one? The new one, at large sizes. When the new system preferences icon is in your dock, it's way too shadowy.

It looks really not good at small sizes. It's too dark. There's like too much darkness in the middle because they've put so many gears in. It's aggressively shadowy. So at large sizes, you see the detail. But when you shrink it down, you do not see that

detail anymore and it gets kind of muddy. And so that's why I actually think that this icon is a worse icon because they've put too much detail into it, I think. Yeah, I agree with you. I like how it looks, but at small sizes, the simple one, I i mean that's the fact of it is that the old icon on the mac was designed for smaller sizes and it's very clear it's one big gear um with a little it's got a little like a little screw in the center and then it's got the two gears that are kind of coming in from the side and you get the sense of what it's doing and you can scan it

at a glance and then the new one i think is a beautiful icon although you know again the teeth of that outside ring aren't attached to anything which is kind of weird it's just these concentric circles i'm not sure it works mechanically but on top of that i don't think it scans as well at smaller sizes and um you know i i don't know about you guys but i'm generally not putting the system preferences icon like out on my desktop uh at like 256 by 256 pixels right it doesn't do that that's not a thing no this i don't know about you but i do have system preferences in my dock and so when i've been using big sir i i really don't like how it looks in the dock which is a shame to me because when i saw it for the first time i was like oh that looks like

a nice icon but then as soon as i what like as soon as I started putting other apps in my dock, it got progressively worse. And now it just looks like this tiny little gray abyss that sits in my dock, which I'm not a fan of. Can I say something about system preferences on the Mac? Yes. Yes, please. I agree with you that the new icon isn't as good as the old one.

But my big problem with system preferences, and it's true in Catalina and Big Sur, is that for the software update one, they use the same icon. So you go to system preferences and it itself uses its own icon for software update. And the real shame of this, I'm going to put this in the Discord,

it'll be in the show notes too, is that Apple has a better software update icon available to it. It's still in the system in core services. It's this blue little aqua globe. Apple used to use this to signify networking or the internet. And it has twisty arrows around it. And I think it's a great icon.

I think they can modernize it in this way and stick it in system preferences. Instead, we're stuck with gears on gears on gears. Yo, dog. It just bothers me. That is weird. I don't know why I hadn't noticed that before now. On the current one, it's just the circular part

without the box around it. Very weird. I'm up next. And I'm going to follow in Jason's footsteps. And I'm going to say in Jason's footsteps and I'm going to say book icons are all bad so

font book, books contacts and dictionary now three of the four used to use like the slightly angled rectangular book so dictionary contacts, font book generally looked the same with, you know, kind of their own flavor. Books was in a circle, whatever. But now they've all been, again,

hole punched, like the MIDI setup, into these round recs. And I don't know about you, but do you have any books? No book is shaped like this. Yeah, there are no books shaped like this and then dictionary so there is some like font book and contacts have little like tabs on the side uh which is not that's fine i guess dictionary has a tiny little bookmark which looks really stupid these are bad they're all bad books are not shaped this way apple yeah please move on kindles are i have a couple other notes here. One is that the dictionary you can see in the old version is actually thick.

Whereas the new ones, who knows, they look like little novelty gifts you'd give at Christmas where it's like, oh, it's a notepad with like 10 pages in it. It's not, they have no depth. Although the dictionary does get a little bookmark.

A little tail. Something. I do want to observe a few things that I do think are positives about this design, because I agree with you. I think books in general are bad. I laugh when I look at the old dictionary. Book icons. Books are good. Books are the paper men.

I will say books are bad. All right. Yeah, the books icons in uh big sir are bad but i did laugh because if you look at that dictionary icon again sometimes you don't look at these icons and not at this level and then you stare at them and you think well wait a second so i laugh at the ineptitude of the design of the old dictionary book itself because it has big text at the top that says dictionary dictionary in case you didn't know from the label below it that it's the dictionary app don't you like it when applications

tell you exactly what they are yeah um through song and imagery not through actually writing the words on there and the other thing that i will i will applaud them for is font book what i like about font book is that it's got the little, instead of a big F with some circles around it, which is sort of like, you know, it's a font building kind of bezier kind of thing going on there. Instead, the new font book has

like a sans serif A and then they've got a serif A and I think there's a slab serif and they've got like a little handwriting-y A. And so it's four A's of different styles of font. And I actually think that's a better way to convey what font book is yes but it's in this little uh little cake well it's like i like so i think agree that like the the the a's of font book are a better way of showing that but it doesn't look good like that's my problem with it it's like whatever they've chosen or what it just doesn't look very nice like the four a's stacked on top of each other like that

while i do agree that it is a better way to show what it is yeah oh boy what am i gonna uh say bad things about the tyranny of the round wrecked is one that keeps getting to me. But I'm going to use my time here to bag on Mike's messages icon. Okay. Broadly, I think it's a mistake for Apple to continue to use green as the messages icon. Which I agree with. Because iMessage is blue. Blue is good. Green is bad.

You don't want green bubbles. You want blue bubbles. And they made green their icon. So I think that's baked into it. With Big Sur, Apple is taking the blue messages icon that shows a speech bubble and then another bubble with the ellipsis in it, like they're typing, which is a perfect encapsulation of what messages is. And they're throwing that away and replacing it with this green round rect with a single speech bubble on it and then there's the worst part for me which is there's a big drop shadow below it it's it's super rendered which at high i mean i don't love it talk about your hidden cakes mike i think that speech bubble is a cake. Okay. I think it's a cake.

It's so arched and like, so you can see that level of detail when you zoom in. But when it's living in your dock, what I find is it looks dirty. It looks muddy. The speech bubble ends up being kind of like hard to pick out. The contrast isn't great. And then the green, the potentially bright green round wreck behind it it's also now muddy because there's a shadow gradient on the background plus the actual gradient of the round wreck so you get like the bottom half of the the rectangle is muddy

and it it looks just kind of like a like it's smudged and i want to clean it up you know i i do agree with that actually i don't and this is like a similar thing that is in system preferences like the darkness like the small sizes of these icons is like a similar thing that is in system preferences like the darkness like the small sizes of these icons is a problem and that that problem does exist in messages too I don't have I don't disagree with the points that you're making but like the original point that I was making is messages should be consistent because it's important I agree with that but but I think they should have changed iOS to be blue rather than change mac to be green i never really thought about it until i stared at this icon but the mac messages icon in catalina

it's a good icon i like having the two bubbles and the little three dots it's like yeah that's actually what happens in that app i like it i i i'm very sad that they've decided to just lift the iOS icon, which is inferior in concept to rather than taking the Mac icon. So, oh, well. I wonder if part of this sort of darkness shadow issue is that people or even by default, the dock icons are pretty big. And those of us who may use it on the side or have a lot of icons, they do get smaller. And maybe Apple is erring on the side of big dock icons. I have to say that one thing they could do, and they clearly aren't doing, is you can make different icons at different sizes that are a little bit different, right? They could drop some of the shadow off at small sizes to make it more readable. But they don't do that. So, I don't know. I don't know. Mike, it's your choice for a bad one i'm not gonna cheat like my friends here and pick like seven applications at

once i'm just gonna continue picking one at a time okay home yes yes you want to talk about lazy also talk about cake icons this could be one of them they took the existing home icon which is the stacked house effect which gets lighter for every stack which is a fine icon for home i have no problem with that no no let me stop you there because i know where you're going with this and i agree with everything you're about to say but i just want to pause for a moment and consider the home icon in general because it's terrible i think it's terrible it is like a home with a bunch of little raised kind of home-ish shapes that turns into like a home plate at the end for baseball or something and it is it's the gradient going in i think it's ugly i don't like it i think it's dumb uh i don't have a lot of

words here other than to say i think it's a ugly icon. And then what they did with it is nothing. Well, they slightly tilted it away, maybe. Oh, I don't know. Maybe it's just a shadow. But they just took it, shrunk it down, put it in a white square, put a shadow around it, and called it done. Done. No, I'm not up on this one.

Like, I don't like this one. It's not good. It's super lazy. Like, it might be one of the laziest icons in mac os they just shrunk it down and put it in a white round rack and then that was it like at least with safari looks like they did some work to the compass right like they changed the compass a bit you know like they they changed the shading and stuff like that inside of the blue like they did some stuff there they really just did nothing with home they're just like there you

go now mike it's gonna sound like i'm trolling you here about about the music's icon but i'm really not i i i'm dead serious it would be a better home icon if it if it had a background of some kind and then cut into it was the silhouette of a house. I would agree with you in this case. Because I don't think a stack of items on top of a house is necessary to get across that this is the home app, right? The home silhouette does it. So why don't you use the home silhouette

and then maybe one of the colors from this gradient and say that's the color of the home app and do it like that. And either cut that out of the white background or have that be the background and have it have a white cutout rather than this lazy abomination. Lost picks? I can't believe mine is still here. I can't either, honestly. Quick time player. Now, this is one where Apple wasn't playing from a position of

strength the old quick time player which i think showed up in when did they go to quick time player 10 do you remember jason it's a long time ago now it's been years yeah and they did this 10 years goofy black to gray gradient with the q logo and then there's a blue gradient which goes the opposite direction inside of it. Very strange. And all they did, like the home app, they stuck it in a round rack. There's a slight blue gradient to the round rack, so we have three gradients.

We have the background is dark blue to slightly lighter blue, bottom to top. Inside the Q, it's the background gradient, but all darker going the other way and then the queue itself is still gradient in fact maybe even a more noticeable gradient now yes it looks like you're looking texture it looks like if you put a trash can mac pro down inside an aquarium and look down upon it that's kind of what it looks like. And it has the same problem the MIDI player has

where it's too close to the edges. The little pointy bit at the end of the little part of the cue that comes out. I'm sure that has a name. I'm sorry. It's like almost to the edge. Many of my problems with these that are set into round wrecks is they all need to be a little bit smaller. Airport Utility has the same problem.

It's too close to the edges. QuickTime player is bad. Too many blues. Pick a blue. Stick with it. Too many gradients. Makes me upset. I actually have a broader point here, which is this QuickTime player, which the chat room says was in Snow Leopard when they did this. Remember, what they did here was they made a new QuickTime thing that didn't use any of the QuickTime APIs. And then last year, they deprecated the old QuickTime. It went away completely. So you couldn't use the old QuickTime editor at all.

You could only use this new QuickTime player. So they're saddled with the old QuickTime icon, which has been around since before Steve Jobs came back. Okay. Yeah, it's from the 90s. It's a 90s technology that they've deprecated now, and it's a 90s icon. So I'm going to make a modest proposal,

maybe for next year. I think Apple needs to get rid of the QuickTime brand. It's from the 90s. It's dead. It's gone. There's no QuickTime left. All it is is a media player. Why don't they call it something like Media Player,

give it a new boring but informative icon and walk away because as much as i loved quicktime and spent lots of hours in the quicktime editor and the quicktime player and all of that it's over so maybe just embrace that it's over put it to bed and you could get a better icon out of it because they are struggling with how to represent this icon from the 90s in a modern way and my my only other statement here, Stephen, is that on top of all of that, and it does look like a Mac Pro a little bit, but I prefer to think of it as a cookie cutter. It looks like a cookie cutter to me.

Like at Christmas, you know, you get your Santa, and you get your reindeer, and you get your QuickTime icon cookies. And you can make those, so enjoy. Who doesn't love Q-shaped cookies? It's the reason for the season. Quick time is. Come on. Oh boy, it's my turn now. Now, you've taken a lot of my good ones.

I'm going to go with a little, well, they're all nitpicky. A nitpicky one, which is Terminal. I use Terminal all the time. All the time. Terminal is a great app. And this is one of those cases again where the it's the tyranny of the round rect because the old terminal icon although small

and a little bit squished it's kind of it's a terminal prompt in a four by three ish sized window like an ipad ish sized window and the new one it's a terminal prompt in a round rect. Terminals aren't shaped that way. Like you could do it, but you would be just a bad person to do it that way. Like that's not how it works. And it really bothers me. Every time I launch terminal in Big Sur, I think, no, no, the terminal is not square.

The terminal isn't shaped like that. It's gotta be wider. It's gotta, that's how people use it. So if you're gonna represent a terminal, this feels like a bad idea. Also, this would be a great opportunity to do something a little more fun and skeuomorphic where it's a more old style computey terminal inside a shape. Like it's almost like it's a CRT maybe or something like that where it feels old. I think they've also missed the opportunity to add some color to this.

All my terminals are a bright green on black background. It's fun. It feels very old. And they've lost that here or they missed the opportunity for that. And I know that this is a minor thing, but like the bottom line is not everything is around rect. And by putting it in around wrecked they've uh they've disappointed me that's what i'm saying console i think has the same problem right like yeah it the same thing happened the text is now a little bit smaller i will say though i think this treatment

works for activity monitor i kind of like activity monitor look going from looking like an ipad to an apple watch like those shapes but, console and terminal feel like siblings that got the same punishment. Also in my head canon for Apple icons, the activity monitor is the readout of what you're hearing through the stethoscope in disk utility. If your hard drive sounds like a heartbeat,

you've lost all your data. Also, we haven't mentioned it yet, but I'm just as an aside, since we're talking about medical things, I can't look at digital color meter without thinking that's some kind of CSI and it's a thing full of blood. That's okay. It's blood. There's blood in there, people. That's not a digital color meter.

If it is, they're measuring the color of the blood they found at the crime scene. The gradient on digital color meter is better than the gradient on music. I agree. Just saying. It's just been mentioned, but my final pick is console. Yep. For similar reasons to JSON. So it's basically just they took the old one and they put it in a round rack and put a

silver border around the outside. And it's not as good, right? But the main issue I have is just like, I don't like that console icon at all. So it says, warning, with no G, and then A, 736. Yeah. That's not nice. Like, I don't want to see an icon that says warning on it. Well, that's why console's there.

It's so to read the warnings. But I can't read the warning. It's cut off. No, it's cut off. Yeah. I don't like this icon i really don't like it this is it's it's the icon that says this is literally an app where there's a bunch of text in it and so we're just gonna put a bunch of text in it yeah don't open this it's full of warnings

i don't want it if you keep it closed the warnings go away and you never have to deal with it that's not super true a 736 hey 736 hey can we talk about finder i know it's not in these it's in the migration assistant i find finder clipped into a round rect a sort of upsetting like what do they do to that poor finder face i love it do you what do you think jason i i it makes me uncomfortable because now the finder is a cake too. It's all cakes. What I like about round-racking the finder is it makes it more human.

People don't have corners. Because humans have rounded rectangles. Well, people are more round than they are sharp-cornered. It's nicer. It feels better to me. It's just like a little friend. It fits. I don't hate it.

It's just... So this icon... it fits i i don't i don't hate it it's just it's so so this icon i mean quick time is probably older or i don't know it's close this icon is from the 90s too and they've redrawn it but like this has been the finder is the old mac os icon going way back so it's it's a classic um i'm glad it's still with us. It's actually one of those ones that I'm surprised Apple hasn't done something terrible to it. And if getting it to fit by making it a round rect is what they need to do, I'm okay with it. I don't, I mean, they didn't put it in with a white background.

They didn't put a, like a silver border around it. They didn't add a stethoscope. They didn't do any of that. So that's good. While we're here, the app store icon's terrible. i had that on my list that that was going to be i mean when you're here your family enjoy your unlimited breadsticks because it's the beveled that i mean i don't like the app store icon anyway because it's the letter a spelled out with what was originally like a pen and stuff because it's for you know it's like productivity for applications and please please do not send us the pictures of the three app icons like stacked like i i get i

get it right like we we know app icons on a side but they're cut weirdly which doesn't make any sense they wouldn't do that like and it's got too much shadow and it just looks like hot dogs more than ever it's not white they're white white hot it just looks like hot dogs more than ever. They're white hot dogs. White chocolate-covered hot dogs. That's what it is. Think of it this way. Those are breadsticks that are going to go into the oven. You've got a little blue tray, and you're going to pop that into your toaster oven.

And then, again, when you're here, your family. I thought there were no trays. Bunch of. I wouldn't get there from disc utility that there's no trays in any of these. No trays. They left no trace i think apple missed an opportunity with system information it's the calipers picking up what is a very old school style chip like chips don't look like that anymore i think they could have really redone that and put an apple silicon chip in there but they didn't and by the way talk about silicon chip in there, but they didn't. And by the way, talk about your lazy icon.

That feels like they didn't even reposition it. They literally just put a round rep behind it with the calipers. But the doctor, fortunately, that is a tool that is in the doctor's. So I'm building up the story here, right? So the doctor comes, he's got a black bag. His stethoscope is in it. He listens to the hard drive. He gets the activity monitor information out of there.

And then he needs to measure something something so out of his little leather bag he pulls the calipers his old timey calipers to measure i don't know how big the hard drive is or or something like that that's the story continues the adventures of dr icon oh and and there's blood on the floor and he needs to measure the blood with a digital color meter i think that the uh auto the automator could be the doctor because Because he's a little robot computer doctor. All the things are in that tube. That tube isn't a metal bar. It's a tube containing all his medical items.

Yeah, Dr. Otto. And then he has to consult a book, and he takes out a little round-wrecked book that is shaped like no book in history. But that's how robo-books are. That is. Like Kindles. Story solved.

Stephen Hackett, thank you so much for joining us. Where can people hear your fine work which is sometimes like this and sometimes not if you want more wild stuff you can find me on connected with Mike and Federico on Wednesdays and then every Sunday I am on Mac Power Users with David Sparks

and every other Tuesday with Jason on Liftoff yeah and this just in Dr. Otto is the one who pronounced Lou dead. So adding to the legend. We'll miss you, Lou. Thank you, Stephen. Thanks, guys. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by PDF Pen from our friends at Smile.

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and RelayFM. It is time for some hashtag ask upgrade questions. Back to lasers from our icon sounds app. I've got an icon on the brain now. Too many icons from our Big Sur sounds last week.

We have a question from Jason, which is not you, but Jason, you have the answer. Jason asks, I'm a cord cutter and I love MLB TV, but it's completely undercut by local blackouts.

What will it take for them to get rid of the archaic local blackout restrictions? All right, so let me explain what's happening with Major League Baseball's streaming service. The idea here is if you're in a local market, you can't see the games from your team in your local market. And the whole product exists and was built on the idea that it's letting you see baseball games from other parts of the country, but not your local market.

Why is that? The answer is that Major League Baseball sells the rights to your local team, or the local teams sell those rights, to essentially a channel in your local market that's making a lot of money by being on a cable or satellite system. And there's a huge amount of money to be made there. Plus, those contracts have become enormous. Like the one in LA, it's tens of billions of dollars. Because the cable companies know that one of the ways to stop people from cutting the cord is to put live sports on their channels. And then you're kind of stuck. That's why they make the money they do.

And as a result, a lot of people will say, well, why can't I just spend $100 or whatever for MLB TV and get my local games? And the fact is, because somebody else paid way more than that, and you would need to pay way more than that to get your local games. Now, the good news is if you're a cord cutter, you can get those local games,

but you have to use an over-the-top service. You have to use YouTube TV or Hulu Plus or one of those things. You've got to use a live TV service, at which point you're paying like $60 a month, which is a lot, even if it's for four, six months of a normal baseball season. So it stinks, but a lot of people think, well, why can't I just spend $100 and get my local team? And the answer is because they want you to spend way more money than that. And the people who sold the rights sold it to somebody who wants you to spend that money and knows you will spend that money. So eventually, right now you can do it, but you have to buy an over-the-top service. Eventually they might offer it direct, but it's

not going to be part of the main package. It's going to be a very expensive add-on when it happens. So that's part of it. I think Jason's question is a little more broad because one of the challenges about these blackouts is that what they define as a local market is bogus and includes lots of markets that can't actually see the games on traditional TV. There's an area in Iowa that's got like eight teams that claim it's their local market. When I go to Hawaii, all the California teams, I think, are the local market in Hawaii, but you can't actually watch the games in Hawaii. They aren't on in Hawaii and you can't stream them. And so that is the part. So Jason's question is, what will it take? I don't know. I don't know why they haven't

changed it already. It would actually open up a lot of opportunity for Major League Baseball to serve those fans. And I don't believe it's realistic that the teams are saying, well, yeah, but the cable company in Iowa could put our games on TV. They just don't. It's a little bit silly. I mean, and it's not reasonable for them to do that. So there needs to be reform for the territories because that will allow fans who can't see the games any other way to find a way to pay to see them. But the larger issue, which is why can't I just, as a person who wants to follow my local baseball team, pay $100 a year or $120 a year to see them? The answer is because somebody else paid a lot of money to get you to buy cable or an over-the-top service. And that's just, it's the money.

The money is the answer. It's not, the MLB TV exists, it was created as a way to get everything else, but not steal the money from your local team that gets a huge amount of money from the cable company, essentially, to put their games on cable. So that's's where we are it's a little upstream ask upgrade i don't really know anything about this but i understand the thinking of like if you're in a local area you want to watch your team right and if yeah there should be a way right yeah and that it

wanting to watch your local team though has a value that is way beyond the value of the a service that's for super fans like me who wants to see any any other game they want like the local team has that has a much greater value and that's the that's the trick is people see the people see the the this package for 120 and think oh that includes my local team and then they get disappointed when it doesn't. But I assure you, if it included your local team, it wouldn't be $120 for six months. Probably twice that.

It would be $360 or $300 or it would be a lot more. And you know what? That would be nice if they would offer it. But the fact is what you do if you are a cord cutter, and you really want your local team is for the months that your team is in season, get YouTube TV or Hulu Plus with live TV or one of the other or sling, right? You get one of the over the top providers that has your local cable channel that shows those games and then cancel when the season is over. And I know that that's going to be $50 or $60 a month, and that stinks. But that's basically the price you would pay anyway if they offered it inside

of Major League Baseball's app. Napali asks, with ARM Macs running iOS apps in the future, do you think that a potential convertible Mac could show the iOS-only apps within almost springboard-like UI in tablet mode. So there's a lot here, right? We've spoken in the past about the potential for a convertible Mac, so the idea of being able to flip a screen around to the back. And if you did that, can you imagine a world in which Mac OS changes to only offer you the iOS-based applications because you're not using the keyboard or the mouse anymore because it's now effectively like a tablet.

Depends on how Apple implemented this, right? I think my gut feeling is you would just tap on that beautiful set of colored squares on a white background that is the launchpad. Exactly. Imagine, right? And then swipe through those because that essentially is the springboard interface on the Mac. I think it's an interesting question of like, would Apple make some affordances for a touch only interface if a Mac that has touch and is convertible, if you fold the keyboard around the back, is it smart enough to say, oh, you know, you don't have another keyboard or mouse attached. And so I'm going to go into a more touch friendly mode. I don't know. It feels like that's not Apple style, but maybe I think again, I think it's more likely that Apple would, you know, have a have some sort of affordance-like launchpad, which does that.

And then would it auto-launch launchpad? Probably not, but you can put it in your dock and tap on it, and then you've got an app launcher that you can use that you aren't dealing with a finder. I do wonder about multi-touch gestures in a scenario like that. Would they let me do expose with finger gestures or go to the desktop or something like that? I don't know. It gets real weird real fast, which is why I think if you bet on a convertible laptop at all, I think it would take a lot of steps to get something that rich and that they would probably start with something much simpler that's basically it's a Mac and you just have to deal with your trying to emulate Mac input as much as possible using your fingers. Yeah, I think if we do, and I do believe we will get touchscreen Macs at some point. But if we do, I don't think convertible is the first form factor.

I think there's a lot of steps between now and convertible Mac when it comes to how Mac OS works and operates that would need to be considered. You know, like, would you put a software keyboard on the Mac? Right? You could. You could. You could. But would you? But would you, yeah.

And I think that's, and that is where we start to get into the stuff that Microsoft has grappled with, right? And I'm not sure if Apple wants to go there or not, but they could. It could. Like, if I'm in a tablet mode and I'm running an iOS app,

would you not want to slide up a software keyboard at that point? I don't know. And Marlies asks, what upcoming or rumored new technology are you most excited about right now? So I'll say for me, Jason, while you get your brain

working on some future tech over there, this isn't necessarily future tech for the phone industry at large, but for an iPhone use case, so for an iPhone user, I'm looking forward to high refresh rate displays, ProMotion display on my iPhone. I feel like it's got to be this year, and I'm very much excited about that. And as you would expect, I am still quite bullish, as Tim would say, on foldable display technology. I think we're still at the very beginning of that.

I still think there's interesting things that could happen. Like I'm really intrigued to see like tablets as an idea. Like what would you do if you looked at a tablet being foldable? I think there's still some stuff there that I want to see, and i'm excited for what the future of foldables could look like uh for me it's face id on macs and desktop macs in particular like the more i use um touch id on a laptop the more sad i am that i have to enter my password an awful lot on uh on the mac because i have an imac so i think that face id tech which would also come with an upgraded webcam i would love to see that that's that's a big one for me all right

that is it for this episode of upgrade if you would like to send in a question for a future episode you can send out a tweet with the hashtag askUpgrade or use the question mark AskUpgrade command in the RelayFM members Discord. Don't forget, you can go to GetUpgradePlus.com to become an Upgrade Plus member and you'll get access to that Discord. If you want to find Jason online, you can go to SixColors.com and he is at Jason L, J-S-N-E-L-L.

Jason, are you going to be doing any coverage of the earnings report? Oh, you know it. Charts, charts, charts, charts, charts over the six colors.com. And you'll be tweeting. We'd be doing live tweets.

Uh, probably somebody will. Yeah. If you do, or if, if somebody does, that'll be from the, is that a six colors live?

Is that the Twitter account? Uh, six colors event, six colors event. I'll put that in the show notes, uh, for people, if they want to follow that account

it's a good account to get all of the great tidbits I like it for that I save so many tweets from that account to my notes application to talk about on the show you get all the good tidbits from there if you want to find me online I'm at imike

thank you so much to Fully and PDFPen from smile for their support of the show and uh we'll be back oh and thanks to steven hackett for joining us as well yeah that wild segment i hope that you enjoyed it uh still a summer of fun around here we'll be back next time until then say goodbye jason snowe goodbye mike hurley So goodbye, Mike Hurley.