Up next in 10
Liquid Glass, iOS + macOS 26 and ALL the WWDC25 news! (CultCast #703)
Jun 14, 2025
Leander, Graham and Charlie join us again to break down all the #WWDC25 announcements — #LiquidGlass, #iOS26, macOS 26, iPadOS 26 — and review our prediction game results! Chapters: 0:00 Intro 14:05 Squarespace 15:45 Keynote introduction 19:25 Liquid Glass 31:26 iOS 26 44:55 watchOS 26 51:24 tvOS 26 54:27 macOS 26 Tahoe 1:04:23 iPadOS 26 1:15:34 WWDC25 Prediction Results Follow us! Threads: https://www.threads.net/@cultofmac Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@cultofmac Instagram: https://instagram.com/cultofmac/ X: https://x.com/cultofmac Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cultofmac
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0:00
[Music] good evening and welcome to the Cultcast the best 30 plus minute Apple
0:06
conversation you're going to hear all week long i will be your host today D griffin Jones joining me today some say
0:13
he's blind as a bat but with his heightened senses he can smell typos from a mile away it's our managing
0:20
editor Lewis Wallace all right I got a joke this week great i had the free time to write one also
0:27
joining us the 1980s British pacunk spirit stays with you forever he doesn't
0:33
take orders from anyone that's why he simply refuses to podcast from a quiet private room leander Cany rejoins back
0:41
it's quiet now everyone's left he wanted to test the new workout buddy
0:47
feature in watch OS 26 so he ran a 5K realized the update hadn't finished yet
0:52
so he just ran another one casually he says it's all for the show graham Bower is joining us welcome hello a 5K is
0:59
nothing uh yeah sure says you also joining us he
1:05
spent last night reooting and installing OpenC Linux on his refrigerator it's Charlie Serell welcome it's uh Yeah I
1:13
need to rebuild my my fridge oh yeah didn't didn't quite finish the process
1:20
so it's WWDC week how are we all feeling let's take broad opening statements from
1:27
the class i think that the iPad is uh the iPad update is fantastic
1:34
and I've been using that for a couple of days and I'm also into the some of the stuff on the Mac the spotlight uh the
1:41
new spotlight stuff is really really nice um you can kind of use it as a command line for lots of your Mac now
1:48
can really it it's taken on a lot of features of things like uh Launch Bar Alfred and Quicksilver old which is
1:55
still around uh and you I guess we'll dig into it later but yeah I'm quite
2:00
liking that and also the uh clipboard um history right on the Mac which is
2:07
amazing because that's something that is whenever anyone uses it you can't you know you can't go without it and it
2:14
seems crazy that it's not built in uh and and now it is so you don't have to kind of recommend some weird app to
2:20
somebody and make them learn it it's just there mhm yeah why do you think it took them so long to implement that i
2:26
just they couldn't be bothered i guess it seems like such a great and useful
2:32
feature i think and copy and paste is so essential to the whole you know desktop
2:38
computing experience yeah exactly i I I think it's a little bit like they've done with the software this year what
2:44
they did with uh with the MacBook Pro like a few years ago you know when it when it got came back and it got all of
2:50
the the ports and it had the SD card slot in it and it just did everything that we wanted it to do i mean they made
2:57
an amazing computer and we were like "Thank God finally they've given up on those stupid keyboards and remove it."
3:02
And Johnny's gone you know the war on ports is over and it seems similar it
3:08
seems they're kind of doing that with the the software now all of these things that we asked for on the iPad uh lot
3:13
actual useful kind of nerdy things but which are really really not that well
3:18
they're only nerdy because you have to install you know other software to do them now they're built in they're really
3:24
useful everybody gets to use these useful things yeah i like the windowing on the iPad too like it it is crazy i
3:30
mean that whole stage manager and then the split screen thing the split screen thing was so confusing i could never ever get it to work right and um it was
3:37
such a you know they were bending over backwards to try and make it not Maclike
3:42
when the answer was obvious wasn't it you know just make it Maclike and be done with it it just works although you
3:49
still have to you still can't put your windows exactly where you want them if like what do you mean well it's you can
3:56
more or less but sometimes it just sh like you let go of it and it shifts it by a few pixels and it's like "Oh come
4:01
on why can't I have it there i I I feel I feel like Craig Federigi put that in
4:07
just to piss you off well it worked is it some bug i I hadn't Although you
4:14
know adittly I've only just played around that a little bit last night but I didn't experience that do you think it's a bug or is it part of the design i
4:20
don't know really um it does seem a bit odd i mean it's not like because you can put things not lined up so it's not like
4:26
it make del like it forces you to line them up you can put two windows next to each other and have them slightly out of
4:31
line it doesn't snap them in that way but it just and sometimes if you put the window you know you place it carefully
4:37
and it just stays exactly there so I don't know if it's a bug the only reason I was testing it out is cuz stage manager was a nightmare for that you
4:43
know you you had like three or I don't know three positions on the you could put it or something like this mhm uh it
4:49
always wanted enough of each window visible so that you could tap it if you wanted to they didn't want anything to disappear no and it sounds like now
4:56
they're doing a little bit of that but maybe not as aggressively yeah lewis broad feelings WWDC keynote what do you
5:02
think i'm so tired i uh you know what I think i think they need a new format
5:07
because I think that it's so rapid paced and so it's like you're drinking from a
5:13
fire hose it's just all this information and I mean even when it's your job to sit there and stare at it it's
5:18
impossible and I found myself just my eyes were glazing over when I rewatched it you know or didn't re-watch it i had
5:25
to drop out in the middle to do some work right the during the day of the thing but um I rewatched it later that
5:31
day and and I was just I was just going God you know it's just boom boom boom boom rapid fire right and I was I was
5:38
thinking like they could almost have just done it all in AI they none of those people actually seem real anymore
5:45
it's like it's soulless it's just so that's iOS 9 or whatever 26 I guess it
5:51
is now it everything wraps like that i don't know i just I ranted about this years ago like I these can things
5:57
there's no there's no suspense there's no nothing i mean I love the like the you know the the gimmicky fun stuff you
6:04
know the intro and the that that kind of thing but but the presentations themselves just seem so canned i mean
6:10
well they they literally are canned but it's just that might be wine that might be wine i mean do do you not feel that
6:17
same way i mean I like the look of all the stuff I saw but oh god really yeah i Because I went back and watched it like
6:23
you a second time the first time around you're working and so you know you're trying to uh you know you got you've got some work to do so you you have to
6:29
concentrate on it but then when you can sit back and watch it like as a you know as a as a as a as a regular person as a spectator like as a piece of theater I
6:36
thought you know I thought it was pretty good i I I kind of like the I liked all the you know the fast pace and all the different features they roll out you get
6:42
a I mean like it's a huge platform now it's not no longer like a little handful of products and they're so complex i
6:47
mean there's so many features they're adding i thought I I quite enjoyed it i thought it was actually a really pretty good They're really well put together
6:53
quick snappy overviews of a whole bunch of new stuff that's coming so I mean you know they definitely are well put
6:59
together i mean I'm not suggesting they're not wellcraftrafted i just I don't know man they're just so fast and
7:05
furious the one thing they did that was really great was how they kept uh you know reinforcing like oh and all the
7:12
this you know Mac OS gets all these other great features that you've already seen you know they were really good about that which I don't actually
7:18
remember them being that good about that in the past uh
7:23
it's nice as well that they don't go through all of those features again it's like okay we've seen that yeah and but
7:29
but like I know other times and maybe again you know I I'm slightly distracted day of show because doing all you know
7:36
million other things but um I I often times in the past would find myself going well is is you know is such and
7:43
such feature that is that they talked about in the messages app on the phone is that coming on the Mac or not and
7:48
they they did an excellent job this this time of of just basically saying oh it
7:54
gets all these other things which also a lot of stuff is on everything now as well i mean since they've kind of since
8:00
everything's on Apple Silicon and they kind and they you know I think the new
8:05
uh three of the new apps are all uh um Catalyst apps the Mac ones so they're
8:11
you know iOS first i can't remember which ones i read this on Master no that's right uh phone
8:18
uh journal and I think one of the other ones oh no the the new FaceTime app is all all three of those are Catalyst apps
8:25
yeah so that's the uh the liquid glass stuff looked awesome in the keynote i
8:31
don't know i mean I've read a lot of complaining on uh X and everywhere and
8:36
and of of course I because I have to get my job done have not installed any of these betas uh so I haven't actually
8:42
seen them in real life but um so what do you guys think about that i mean is it is it well because I have to
8:48
get my job done unfortunately I have installed I can't believe you're actually able to participate in the podcast
8:54
well yeah because that's done on my Mac and I don't want to touch Mac OS Tahoe with a 20 foot pole oh so you didn't do
9:00
it on all of them i see okay no no just my iPhone and the Vision Pro because like I mean again there's not really
9:06
We'll get to this later there's not really enough new in Vision OS to really like necessitate the the beta being
9:11
dangerous it's not that you ever use it anyway i've always done that does any
9:17
I I use it several times a week easily but um yeah I I mean between doing like
9:23
almost all of my work on my Mac and spending the evenings like either on like the Vision Pro or the Apple TV I
9:29
don't actually use my phone a lot I think compared to most people so I don't really mind like sacrificing the battery
9:36
life of a little bit for the next 3 months and you know having most things be slightly broken i guess the the thing
9:43
that uh for the phone is the is the banking apps and things like this right
9:48
yeah m that kind of stuff because you know it's generally that stuff is on the phone rather than an iPad or something
9:54
you know yeah yeah that's true well you know banking you can you can all do that on the web and most of the banking apps
10:00
are just like crummy web apps anyways and they're pretty much the same but but you can't what if you can't pay for something yeah or if all your savings
10:07
disappear in a pool of liquid glass well that's that's a risk that comes
10:13
with a job i'm just thinking about this uh occasional Vision Pro use you mentioned do you have it hung on a peg
10:19
in the bathroom and you put it on whenever you go and sit on the toilet i actually have a little personal
10:28
i'm going to have a hard time unseeing that it sits in my living room i have like a a large sort of like a you know
10:35
corner table that it sits on that's I just in the corner of the room so that it's not at risk of being like knocked
10:41
over by the dogs or anything but it just seems like a perfect kind of toilet computer really i will say it is good
10:47
for that if you already happen to be wearing it you know you don't have to worry about like holding your phone with you or that getting dirty like Exactly
10:53
and you're not moving very much so you're not going to get tangled up hopefully you can bring an invisible window and just like sit it right in
10:58
front of you that was the original spec for the iPad wasn't it steve Jobs he wanted something he could do his email on while he was
11:05
taking his morning constitutional yep yep one thing I learned from the keynote
11:10
is that baggy pants are in did you notice that was wearing big baggy pants now I see them everywhere they're like "Oh my my son has a bunch of friends
11:16
around they're all wearing big baggy pants." So I'm like "Oh you know I'm not really attuned to fashion as you can
11:21
tell." And it's it's that's a thing
11:27
i quite like the revolving cast of characters too they seem to be new people every year like what happens yeah I like them there was some good ones
11:33
this year i feel though that that the personality is drained out of them though like these people they look like
11:39
really interesting people and but they their speech has been coached to a point at which they're not them anymore you
11:45
you kind of want to say you know blink if you're okay it's like that I I just
11:50
feel like I I would I would love if Apple let their personality come out a bit more rather than them all like we
11:58
are incredibly excited and we're thrilled and all this excessive positivity i mean of course it has to be
12:04
positive but I don't know a little bit of quirkiness a bit of personality it used to be that when people would
12:09
come on the like new people would come on to present on the live shows they'd just be terrified
12:15
right so this is I think we like we liked seeing the or I liked seeing the fear in their eyes
12:22
and I missed that yeah right that's exactly what I'm talking about it's you
12:27
know they you know like how many takes did they do it you know the the the poor woman who talks about you know the phone
12:33
app you know is this like the 57th take and it's all been boiled down and cut down so it's you know tight as can be
12:40
and yeah there's just just no there's no time to breathe in those things you know it's just blah blah blah blah blah you
12:47
know the same locations the same I I started wondering if all the locations were CGI i mean I'm pretty sure it's the
12:55
Apple Park but I it knows i mean it just all seems so synthetic well they started
13:00
using the a new location the the new observatory which is like one of the new buildings that they built on the edge of
13:06
the campus yeah I saw a tweet about that someone said "Oh we're not allowed to take pictures but here's four pictures."
13:12
And then um they have four pictures inside of it and I'm like what what is
13:17
it is it It's not like a a real observatory is it they call it that because it has like a big sort of like
13:22
bubble-shaped window that overlooks like the main building but the general idea is that I think this is more of like a
13:27
private press area where they can have like you know briefings and stuff that's a little more suited than the Steve Jobs
13:33
Theater like it has a Well what are they doing the Steve Jobs Theater now i mean it's got to be empty right they haven't
13:39
used that for a for a while i think there was an they do like uh company
13:46
events there and I know that on Tuesday night they had a private screening of
13:51
the F1 movie there with selected members of the press they probably rent it out for bar mitzvah and things too
13:58
that I also heard that observatory that's where they sacrifice the goats
14:03
right well before we get into uh the thick of it any more that we already have let's
14:11
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checkout that's squarespace.com/cultcast for 10% off so I guess let's go in
16:01
keynote order we start with Craig Federigi racing an F1 car around Apple
16:07
Park tying in with the F1 movie and we cut to Tim Cook and he says "F1 baby."
16:14
What do we think about that i can't believe we had another Hair Force One joke i'm I'm like so over jokes about
16:21
Craig Feder's hair i mean I don't care i just don't care he's got
16:26
great hair though i mean it is good i'm jealous yeah i heard that was an F2 car i saw that
16:34
somewhere i don't know what the heck the difference is but maybe maybe F1's are too
16:40
dangerous too expensive to to film with was this the bit where he's Was this the bit with the golf cart or was that later
16:47
oh that I'll say the golf cart one was pretty funny that was pretty funny but I've got a question for all of you um
16:53
Americans and American dwellers uh in That's like everyone except me you're
16:59
deliberately just excluding me but I I'll I can handle that good well you'll see why uh
17:06
the the when he when he breaks in his uh in his golf cart the tires squeal
17:12
whenever I watch an American TV show or movie somebody just pulls slowly away
17:17
from the from the curb or you know in a parking garage and the tires squeal well that never ever happens in any any other
17:24
car so is is that something that happens or is that what your cars do do they just always better tires
17:30
maybe that's it you got cheap tires no they're better they're they're grippy as can be
17:36
and And our cars are bigger and stronger with 800 horsepower you just you just
17:41
lightly feather the gas in it every single time okay i think Americans tend to drive much more sedately than than
17:48
Europeans i mean there's nothing more dangerous than like some European capital you know like Rome or something like that polarmo yeah oh my god
17:56
and Americans all drive like old ladies you know it's very very sedate it's actually really nice once you get used to it at first you know you become
18:01
enraged you're like why is this person in front of me hurry it up but then you know if you if you go if you you force
18:08
yourself to be zen and it's much nicer mhm i mean personally I used to speed all the time but then I realized you
18:14
know it's just much more relaxing to just let everybody pass you just drive the speed limit and then you don't have
18:19
to worry you don't have to pass anybody you don't have to think "Oh no if I get in front of this person then that person behind me is going to be mad and they
18:24
won't catch up." And you don't have to play like that you know yeah me too i become one of those infuriating drivers i can tell because people pull up right
18:30
behind me so close and I can tell I'm a really infuriator and that makes me go even slower i love it i know yeah that's
18:36
great and you get better mileage that way but yeah in all seriousness they just add those tire squealing sound effects literally every time no matter
18:43
how slowly somebody's driving just because it makes it more exciting even just when they're parked and they just cut to a picture of the car yeah yeah
18:50
and you know the other thing is like in movies and TV shows they always add like that uh whenever somebody like locks
18:55
their car it always makes like a chirping sound for some reason well when people touch sort of sound touch their
19:00
phones it always beeps as well so you know yeah yeah but like car alarms like
19:06
locks and stuff like that it usually just sounds exactly the same as the horn i've never known a car to like actually
19:12
make like that like you know stock sound effect chirping noise when you hit the lock button oh I've heard that that's
19:17
how it works in in Europe oh really
19:22
okay well they learn something new every day let's move on to Liquid Glass their
19:27
new visual design style how do How do we feel about Liquid Glass
19:33
i think it's great i really don't like it and I the legibility um complaints are way overblown i mean it's a bunch of
19:40
hot takes you know someone saw some screenshots where um you know the uh the notifications were obscured and it's
19:46
like "Oh my god you know Steve Jobs would never ship this." I saw a really funny tweet about they had a compilation
19:51
of all the right dodgy interfaces that Apple shipped over the years you know
19:56
like um that that stainless steel look for a while that started in QuickTime and Aqua itself you know yeah right
20:03
exactly i mean Apple has done a whole bunch of extremely ugly innovations
20:09
they certainly have it looks nothing looks more dated now than like an old iMac or something like that right it's like it just screams 90s and and the
20:15
same with Aqua too and this is Aqua Reds but I saw some um you know
20:22
it um it does make the fluidity of it and like there was a screenshot today of
20:28
of if you sh if there's a white light shining through it it actually refracts into the colors of the rainbow yeah
20:34
which is like that is just mindbending you know like the attention that that attention to detail and clearly it's the
20:40
basis for you know a whole bunch of nextg UIs that are going to come in AR glasses and you know all these other you
20:48
know devices that are going to be coming up in the future i think it's like a fabulous fantastic start and I couldn't be more excited about it i really I and
20:54
it looks even better on the Mac than it does on the iPhone i think like my Mac just looks gorgeous i can't believe how
21:00
beautiful it looks i got that to that crazy excitement you know when you get it and you like go "Oh my god it's a new device." Until it costs like nothing
21:06
works like Slack doesn't work and it can't do any work on it but you know it does look good but you can look really
21:11
good not working yeah you said Le that there's no problem with the legibility of it but uh at the beginning of the
21:18
podcast when we were trying to get going you couldn't even see the green camera icon in the menu bar well I'm actually
21:26
no that I'm not using I'm actually on a machine that's not running one of the betas which is why I'm able to join this
21:31
podcast i think people got scared that like you know in the demo video you know a lot of
21:37
this liquid glass stuff is completely like much more translucent it lets in
21:43
much more of the background than before things aren't as blurred as before and although they've dialed the back on
21:49
dialed it back a little bit on legibility they've afforded themselves you know much more room for beauty and
21:54
it is still easy to read a lot of the time because yeah it's clear a lot of the time it's quite a qualification
22:01
that's yeah that's I think even even if you look at Apple's accessibility guidelines then Apple is breaking them i
22:07
mean it is an accessibility nightmare we have I mean you look at the amount of contrast between the text and the
22:13
background and that that's one of the kind of key metrics to to analyze in terms of how legible text is and we've
22:20
got white on light gray all over the place at the moment and of course these are betas so Apple may well address
22:26
these accessibility issues but I I I I personally I don't think it's overblown
22:31
to say that there are big accessibility issues right now with liquid glass i
22:36
mean especially looking at things like in the music app um when the name of the the artist is in white text on liquid
22:44
glass if you've got white album art behind that it it's very low contrast
22:50
and that wouldn't pass muster with Apple's own accessibility guidelines so I don't know if they're going to do
22:55
something to address that um but as it stands I think you know in in Europe it might not might not even be compliant
23:02
with uh with the law in term in terms of there are there are laws in the UK um
23:08
the disability discrimination act that that that require that you take reasonable steps to make sure that that
23:14
your product is accessible and the the web accessibility guidelines and
23:19
complying with them is is usually what's considered to be necessary to be compliant with that legislation and
23:25
Apple is Apple is not compliant with that right now and I I as a designer I have mixed feelings actually because I'm
23:31
a graphic designer myself and I love putting text on images and I often have clients saying "Oh that's a little bit
23:37
hard to read." And I disagree with them and it it frustrates me sometimes if a client wants something to be so visible
23:43
that you have to put like great big white backgrounds behind black text and it really limits your options as as a
23:50
designer so I do think there's a lot of trade-offs going on there but I I think right now it's pretty clear that Apple
23:56
has stepped across a whole bunch of accessibility lines and and I was thinking how do they justify that there
24:03
are obviously settings in in iOS that you can go in and increase the contrast and so I I suspect maybe they think that
24:10
they're safe because they've got those settings for people who need it but from past experience if you enable those
24:15
settings you kind of get a subpar experience you know the design is not so well thought through when you enable
24:22
those those kinds of settings and so I don't know the the trade-off here is I I
24:28
I guess they're targeting youngsters with excellent eyesight well having used it there's a big
24:34
difference between uh looking at static images of it and even watching their keynote video and using it yourself
24:40
because alth although a lot of the backgrounds are a little more clear than before seeing it in motion like it's
24:46
really easy to separate like the letter forms that are static on like a toolbar at the bottom and the background that's
24:51
like blurring and moving behind it it's much easier to differentiate it than you might think and and also there is the
24:57
accessibility setting like um the the reduced transparency option makes it
25:03
look less like glass and more like the frosted gray texture material that things have been made from before so any
25:11
and those are universal because those are all because the liquid glass material is like a system element so
25:16
like when you enable reduced transparency all of the liquid glass parts of the interface are going to turn
25:21
like that frosted gray material whether you have it call it cataract mode geez
25:29
i saw somewhere that they they you know uh was it in the keynote or uh maybe it was a tweet I saw that they have an
25:36
accessibility uh the VP of accessibility or whoever it was you know was reportedly heavily
25:43
involved m so I got the impression from something I saw like I said I can't remember where that um that that was one
25:51
of the central things that they you know that they took into account while designing it was you know accessibility
25:56
and that would sort of ring true given their commitment to I mean at least I believed it I mean it might have been some unconfirmed tweet but you know it's
26:03
it rang true because you know Apple of all companies has paid a lot of attention to accessibility i think
26:08
that's true apple does have a really great record on accessibility i I also think it's true there are some issues
26:13
with accessibility in in Liquid Glass but I mean we've seen this before when they've introduced new UIs in the the
26:20
betas there's lots of finessing that happens before they actually ship it so some of the issues that exist right now
26:27
may well be addressed by the by the time it ships but I I'm pretty sure you know like when you whenever you get white on
26:33
light gray that that's never okay i love it as a designer i love it and I there's
26:38
nothing that I saw in the keynote that I had any trouble reading i just know from
26:43
working in graphic design for years that that this is going to be a problem for some people and um I was surprised it
26:50
makes everything look like daring fireball well well not true because the text size
26:57
has gotten bigger and the spacing is more generous oh okay so that's the opposite of daring fireball yeah yeah
27:02
which is actually one of my problems with it if I I'll be honest like on the on the first page of like the settings
27:09
screen um you used to be able to see like you know your name at the top the top section and like half of like the
27:16
next section after that but now like the spacing is so generous i'll cover up the family screen here like you only really
27:22
see the first section and maybe like the first like line item of the second group
27:28
of settings there like the spacing is so lenient that like you you know our phone
27:33
screens keep getting bigger but also like the spacing of any of these like system lists keeps getting like wider
27:41
and wider and bigger and I even have the text size on my phone turned all the way down but like despite that like the size
27:47
of each list element is just huge now which is one of my problems on on the layouts one of the things that really
27:52
struck me is you know when iOS 7 came out and they had an edgetoedge design and everything went right to the edges
27:59
of the screen and there was no padding or margins or anything it used up the whole screen and then slowly what we've
28:05
had since iOS 7 is more padding and more margins added and we had these tile
28:12
tiled user interfaces and and so forth but what we now have with this latest version is even the sidebars have margin
28:20
to the left of them it's like and and I think there's more there's margin underneath the the dock as well so
28:27
everything is is getting more and more padding like I think uh you know if if
28:32
we if we fast forward to like 20 years from now then like Apple design will just be everything kind of you know
28:40
based upon like it's co 19 and and social distancing it looks really good on the iPad though i'm running on the
28:46
the 12 uh well the 13inch iPad uh Pro the my old one it looks really really
28:52
nice uh just I'm looking I was looking in the the settings app because uh Griffin
28:58
mentioned it and well I don't know if you can really see well it doesn't make no but it looks a lot better than it
29:04
used to i think that the the buttons and I haven't really dug into it yet into
29:09
the settings that much but in general yeah it looks really nice it look it looks spacious but it the like the
29:15
information density is is good i don't have mine set to be like bigized text
29:21
yet uh but um yeah the Yeah I've got more to say about
29:27
the iPad stuff later but we're on the we're on liquid uh glass right now so one other thing to say about liquid
29:33
glass from my perspective is Apple design tends to be very very influential with graphic designers you know when
29:40
they launch a new visual style then you you start to see other companies all around the world echoing is a polite way
29:47
to say it what what Apple's doing visually and I think one of the things that's interesting about liquid glass is
29:53
it's much much harder to replicate it's not something that you could easily put together in in Figma or in in Photoshop
30:00
because they're actually I I don't exactly know how they do it but it would have to be some something they've done
30:05
programmatically at a system level so it it's not just like the liquid glass is
30:10
blurring the image behind as you said Leander you get these these kind of spectra spectrographic things it's like
30:18
it's ray tracing the the light and distorting it as it as it moves through the glass and and refracting the light
30:25
and uh that's very very hard to reproduce without actually 3D modeling
30:31
you know and so I think it raises the bar and I think what Apple's introduced here is something that's going to be I'm
30:37
sure lots of people will find crude ways to replicate it i'm already thinking of crude ways to replicate it but to
30:43
actually really in an animated way replicate this right now is going to be a bit of a challenge and I bet the likes
30:49
of Adobe are thinking about that thinking about tools to enable people to do it replicating is going to be much harder than just using the system UI
30:56
elements anyway so like what Apple has done here is they've they've almost like planted like a a flag in every app that
31:03
says you know this element is using our system APIs this app isn't and it gets nothing yeah that's true yeah so it'll
31:10
be much easier to to really be able to explain the difference to somebody who doesn't understand what you know any of
31:15
those words mean they'll be like oh yeah this is an app that's using Apple system buttons this is using some crummy
31:21
crossplatform thing that they develop parallel with Android
31:26
but on that note let's move on to the um iOS 26 unique features we have the uh
31:34
spatial scenes that you can now set as your lock screen and wallpaper the new camera app the new Safari app which is a
31:43
return to the to the iOS 15 beta Safari with the super minimal tab bar all that
31:50
how do we how do we I don't like Safari so far on either the Mac or the um uh
31:56
iPad much harder to see the tabs in fact to make them out like I couldn't tell where the tabs were uh and especially
32:02
when it went into dark mode like last night I was on my iPad and I had a bunch of tabs open and it was I couldn't tell what the hell was going on i'm hope they
32:08
address that yeah it's hard to hard to differentiate the tabs in dark mode but who who used the camera app didn't
32:13
someone use a camera app i haven't I haven't touched it yet i've used the new camera app and it's it's interesting so
32:19
the nice thing is that it's now like much faster to switch between all the different modes like you know they have
32:25
they have portrait mode cinematic mode slow motion mode panoramic mode and now you can just like smoothly drag your
32:30
finger across it and it'll like swipe between all of them that's much faster i was kind of hoping that they would
32:36
redo that user interface of like swiping left and right between this like horizontally scrolling list uh they
32:43
haven't really rethought that which is a little disappointing to me but I mean the overall user interface is generally
32:49
like much simpler than before you I mean at first you just see like the two buttons photo video tap to take a
32:56
picture you tap on the little like photo or video picker to have all your settings it's it's pretty simple i
33:02
haven't left the house much this week so I haven't taken many pictures but I I do like where they're going with it yeah I
33:08
found the old the old interface was really confusing it was like it was way too it was hard to find out where all the different settings were and every
33:14
time I wanted to change the the zoom it would go into a different mode um and then oh my god camera control you know
33:20
the camera control button you accidentally you know get get into you accidentally press or long press that and you get into some different mode oh
33:26
my goodness game over what am I doing now can't even take a picture it's awful
33:32
the best thing I liked was um pressing to hold on the on the shutter button you know pressing to hold to take a video i mean that was that seemed to me like the
33:38
the best UI for switching between a photo and video that everyone's ever invented mhm you can thank Snapchat for
33:45
that i think they pioneered that okay yeah have any of you tried the new phone app
33:51
with their unified design yeah I like that i like that too i like that too although someone had a good criticism like it lists all your recents um from
33:59
you get your your your your most your favorites you know the people you call the most at the top but then you get a list of your recent calls and the recent
34:06
it's kind of useful but more on it's like oh spam call here's another scam you know whatever the bank some bills
34:13
people you don't want to talk to maybe the voicemail would have been better there um instead of the recent calls
34:19
because that's kind of more you know useful but yeah so far it's pretty I think it was a really clever clever idea to to to shake that up because you know
34:26
so often that you know it's buried all that all that stuff is all buried at the tabs at the bottom like in voicemails too you know I think I have 160
34:32
voicemails or something I haven't listened to gez which uh I might want to go take a look at but you know so seeing
34:39
that kind of a bit more front and center I would prefer but so far I liked it a lot and then I saw somewhere today that
34:44
um you get some haptic feedback when someone answers the call now oh really
34:50
which sounded kind of interesting i haven't experienced it myself but okay that sounds like a really good idea one thing I like it's really interesting how
34:56
I think Apple has been burned by the photos app redesign last year so now when you first launch the phone app it
35:03
has like one of those tips that pops up that says "Hey there's a new design available if you want to enable that." And you can switch to it or you can like
35:10
switch back and just keep using the old app like they're they're making it opt in now oh okay which is very interesting
35:18
after the the horror of LA last year's photo app yeah and speaking of the photos app it's no longer one giant
35:26
continuous scrolling view you now have the the the tab bar that lets you switch between your library and collections
35:34
i was very happy to see them reper revert to that well what I actually miss about the old
35:41
design is that uh you although they have the tab bar back if you want to switch between the two the only way you the
35:48
only area the only part of the screen where you can do that is that little navigation bar in the lower left uh I
35:54
kind of miss being able to swipe between them and I I submitted a feedback to
36:00
Apple suggesting that like they they can keep the tab bar there you know that's all well and good keep the people happy
36:05
who don't understand the swiping gestures but I should still be able to swipe down from my library to get to
36:11
collections and swipe up from the collections to get to my library
36:16
you know because because the swipe gesture you can do anywhere from the middle of the screen you know it's it's much easier to do you know
36:25
it sounds sounds like nobody else agrees i I I I think they nailed it with the original iPhone and I love the the tab
36:31
the tabs along the bottom and and I I almost never like it when Apple tries to curate what they think I'm interested in
36:38
because they just they don't know what I'm interested in it's like with the the mail app when they introduce the how it
36:44
triages it into different categories and I tried to leave that on for a couple of hours just to get my head around what it
36:51
was and it's like nope this is too annoying turn the whole thing off couple hours wow i didn't even make it that far
36:57
mine was off after a couple days i was really I was trying to like it you know i was I was trying to be open-minded to
37:03
something new um but so I I just I don't like Apple curating things for me it's
37:08
it's like I want to have each thing in its own tab and I will you know decide what I'm going to look at
37:14
it seems that with the apps that like the photos app things that show you know
37:19
show you things that you've already got uh it's that they kind of seem to be
37:27
wanting to get like keep your engagement up like a website like a like an Instagram or something like this and so
37:32
instead of just being a list of stuff that's that's easy to get to you know your recent pictures finding the picture
37:37
all the pictures of your you know your your dog or your husband or whatever uh
37:43
it's all of these other bits and pieces in there you know here's your memories here's this and putting them front and
37:48
center gets a bit annoying because like Graeme says it's like that's not probably I mean it might be what some people want but it's not what everybody
37:55
wants so it's just going to annoy a lot of people as well and I I think the photos app has got worse and worse the
38:00
more they've added to it i mean I'm not saying that it's just only been bad new features there's a lot of stuff I really
38:06
like in there you know like the search is is excellent the the lookup is really good all sorts of good things but I used
38:12
to write a lot of how-tos and when I was writing how-tos at Cult of Mac and there the photos app was a rich source of
38:19
those because there's so many hidden features that are just impossible to find if you want to uh like find out how
38:26
to add a face to the uh you know to the faces thing now now it's got a lot easier but it's still tricky go go go in
38:34
and kind of dig into it and try and do it explicitly manually rather than just saying uh letting it kind of suggest
38:39
them for you and it's very hard to find things uh so I don't know i I think this
38:47
new one I haven't looked at the the the iOS one yet but the iPad one is
38:52
definitely a step back in the right direction it's a lot It's a lot easier to use a lot cleaner speaking of search
38:59
though they they put the search button back at the bottom of the screen and that was my only I think uh stand
39:07
standing complaint from the from the iOS 18 photos app it's now easy within reach and you know you tap it and it
39:13
automatically brings up the keyboard and everything that's that's fantastic apple intelligence features now an image
39:19
playground you can use chat GPT to create images in a variety of styles how do we feel about that
39:27
angry image playground i like grock you know for images i think
39:34
that that one's been my the one I've used the chat gbt i haven't actually tried it for images has anyone tried it is any good for images chat GPT i've
39:41
never even thought to ask it for an image i mean I I yesterday I tried that in image playground and I just gave it
39:48
an image and it said your daily limit of images has been reached so did what it
39:53
what it should say is your daily li your daily limit of liters of water wasted while generating these images has been
39:59
reached yeah I like that better yeah you can translate text in messages FaceTime and
40:07
phone calls good i haven't tried it yet that seems very useful though i'm keen to give that
40:12
a go actually and if I have a use case for it yeah I I use uh I send a lot of um texts to people
40:19
uh like because I live in Spain so I'm sending texts in Spanish i would send
40:25
them in Catalan but there's no there's no help there's still not Catalan translation in the in iOS but the um a
40:33
lot of the I I prefer to just write in English and then let let the translation happen and then go and correct it uh
40:39
because it's just a lot quicker than writing in a foreign language for me um and it's a pain to have to highlight
40:45
everything hit the translate you know uh to work on the text then paste it back in or you can tell it to replace with
40:52
trans uh the translated text but that doesn't work in the mail app for example so yeah I find I think this is a really
40:58
really good feature that and the translation stuff in uh in video calls FaceTime calls seems absolutely amazing
41:05
i mean I I speak to my partner's parents on you know on call sometimes when she's
41:10
around and I don't know I don't really say much because I well partly her dad
41:16
goes on and on so I don't want to encourage them but uh so they they speak Catalan yeah and I understand it and I
41:22
speak you know Catalan and Spanish back to them i understand them very well but I don't we don't really have great conversations and I think that this
41:28
would be really helpful you know cuz uh if Apple only supported Catalan please
41:34
well it would be fine with Spanish they was although it would be a bit weird for them to speak Spanish to me because they just don't but I I think one of the use
41:42
case like one of the use scenarios in uh in the keynote was that you would speak
41:48
to your loved ones in a foreign language and I was like well if they're really your loved ones couldn't you be bothered
41:55
to like learn their language but then I I started thinking there actually you
42:00
know that's me
42:06
well what I what I would really like is because I because I I'm still trying to learn Spanish myself living in Spain and
42:12
so when I write things in Spanish to force myself I I don't want to write things in English and get you know Siri
42:19
to translate it i want Siri to tell me off when I write something wrong that that's what I really want i want I want
42:25
them to have corrections for people that are terrible at language to just like you know oh did you mean this and I
42:31
would I would like a lot more of handholding as I tried to do it myself so we also have the new Apple Games app
42:40
uh some people were thinking maybe this would be like they would be separating the app store into an app store and a game store now this is pretty much uh
42:47
game center as an app and also you can find what your friends are playing and
42:52
you can read the editorial stuff and see the top app store games i'll be honest I
42:59
I don't really understand what this is for or why I would use it or open it because if I want to go play a game I'm
43:05
not going to open a games app first i'm just going to open the game I want to play how How do we feel am I just
43:11
misunderstanding something i have a conspiracy theory about this i think that it might be their way of keeping
43:17
control of the app store of the games part of it which is where they make all the money from their inapp purchases for
43:22
children's gambling games uh and
43:28
because Europe's obviously going to force them to open up the app store already doing it and they so if they can
43:34
split off their games section then you know if they're selling uh game
43:39
subscriptions and stuff through this app instead they can argue that okay this is not this is games and that's what Sony
43:46
does that's what the Xbox does you know it's a different model it's a it's a console model and we should be you know
43:52
allowed to have a lot more control over it so have they moved the games out of the app store and into the games app no
43:57
I think no but I think that might be what what this is uh moving towards uh
44:03
this is an intermediate step you mean yeah yeah I saw something like that on X and it made a lot of sense to me i well
44:10
if if that's what they're moving towards they haven't done that yet and I'm kind of not sure why because now I've just learned well I'm not I don't need to use
44:17
the games app or can I delete it i think if they were serious about getting in into games then they they need to buy a
44:23
studio i mean they they Microsoft's been on a on a shopping spree and and Apple
44:30
hasn't really bought anything in this area and I think the only way to get AAA games onto all their platforms is to
44:36
just buy a studio and make it happen like like they have with with uh Apple TV Plus well that's not true they bought
44:42
a studio they bought the twoperson game studio that made Sneaky Sasquatch
44:49
did they yeah yeah well there's a AAA title for you
44:54
let's move on to watch OS 26 we have workout buddy that provides workout
45:00
buddy encouragement during your workout how do we feel about that oh god I'm I'm
45:07
really relieved about it you know because I I I I was genuinely worried that they were going to do virtual doctors and virtual fitness coaches and
45:14
you know for all the reasons that I said last week I think it it's dangerous and it's it's not scientific and it's like
45:21
lying to users and it would have sucked and so I'm really really happy that
45:27
Apple hasn't done this and what they've done instead is something that's simpler and fun and I think people would get
45:32
something out of it um so it it's really just you know and it's one of the things in the article I wrote for Cult this
45:38
week I pointed out that the uh uh if you remember Nike Plus iPod Apple's original foray into fitness it
45:46
it had people like Lance Armstrong giving you these at boyoy messages this was a different era right but it had
45:52
Lance Armstrong when you when you finished a workout he would say "Whoa that was a great workout good good job
45:58
buddy time to transfuse your blood you must be on something." and
46:04
uh that so it's really bringing back that idea that they had in the original Nike plus iPod sport kit of of like
46:10
these at boy messages at the end of workouts but the only difference is now they can obviously put an AI spin on it
46:16
and it can identify things about your behavior like if it was a personal best or the first time you did a 10K and you
46:24
know summarize things and give you encouragement and I I I think why not i think it might be a little bit of fun i
46:30
don't think it's a big feature but I think it's a fun feature i saw somewhere they were saying it's actually really quite an ambitious piece of software
46:35
because it's pulling in from three or four different sources it's agentic it's running on a it's a you know a language
46:43
model or something like that I think and it's actually quite an ambitious piece of AI you know they say people at Apple's behind AI but here is an example
46:49
of actually a really sophisticated piece of AI that you know with a real use case real world use case and that's being
46:55
done really well actually I'm really kind of not looking forward to it the last thing I want to hear is some machine congratulating me when I take a
47:02
bike ride i I can already tell I'm going to be irritated by it it It looked irritating in the in the thing hey that
47:08
was a great set or whatever yes good god it's like full English breakfast again Leander yeah I know it definitely is
47:16
it's definitely not going to appeal to the British mentality for sure i can imagine it's probably not quite as annoying as what they did in the keynote
47:22
because in the keynote they want to show you like all of the different things it might say and so it's just like one thing after another it was annoying i
47:28
hope it's not like that they were really long long messages that's true yeah yeah but um I don't know i I don't expect to
47:36
like it whatsoever but I do I'm curious enough to try it the next time I mow my
47:42
lawn because I do that as an outdoor walk workout your your pace is incredibly stable
47:51
exactly 4.2 miles per hour your sixth walk around your house is something wrong yeah right why are you walking in
47:59
circles does it also give you the uh the sound the noise alerts i don't think it
48:04
does no um I mean I I just have a little push mower so it isn't very loud i see
48:09
and I also like you know noise cancelling earbuds in one of the things I'm really curious about is if if it can
48:15
actually work because the the health kit API which all Apple's fitness stuff is
48:21
based on is incredibly slow i mean you'd notice this if you if you open the fitness app and it it just doesn't show
48:27
you anything for ages and then it takes a good 30 or 40 seconds for your workouts to appear which is just totally
48:34
unacceptable but it's been like that for years um no only Apple could get away
48:39
with something as subpar as that and then anyway so that's an aside it's so
48:45
slow for example if I do a half marathon in my training and I'm wondering if I
48:51
got the half marathon medal you know those little medals that Apple gives you and so I'll I'll go in okay well Charlie
48:58
you do if you run any meaningful distance you get a nice little medal and the thing is it takes hours for those to
49:04
show up in the fitness app so I'll go in and look at the workout and it's like well I run a half marathon and there's no there's no medal there and you know
49:11
check the next day and it's finally shown up so I'm really curious of like sure they've got this LLM which is
49:17
reading the data from the health kit API but the health kit API is terrible so
49:23
you know is it really going to know what workout you just logged right at the end of a workout like that to me implies and
49:29
I really hope this is true that they've they've improved health health kit in some way h well I'm going for a bike
49:36
ride this weekend so I'll I'll report back and let you know i would be interested to hear we also have
49:42
adjustable notification volume relative to the ambient volume of the room the
49:47
wrist flick gesture i think that's really cool it's like it's like the reverse of the like raise tow you know
49:53
you flick it the opposite way and it just shuts up for a second i think that's fantastic and the notes app ah
50:00
yeah i I I so notes yeah I am i am thrilled because when I go for a run I
50:05
leave my phone at home and I'm always thinking about stuff if I'm thinking about creative projects and things and I have an idea and I want to write it down
50:12
and at the moment I use the the voice memos app um on my watch and you know I
50:18
people give me funny looks i'm standing there you know by the beach and I'm talking to my my Apple Watch and this I
50:24
think is going to be it's actually the feature of watch OS 26 I'm most excited about that I can finally take notes when
50:31
when I'm out on a run i would just like to say something about the wrist uh gestures you remember back be uh when
50:37
purple people first started using Bluetooth headsets and and handsfree and they would be having a conversation in the street you still see it now but
50:43
we're more used to it uh and they just be walking around gesturing and you think are they like is that crazy person
50:49
talking to themsel or are they on a phone call and now we've got with the like the head the shaky head and the
50:55
nodding gestures with the AirPods and now the wrist thing i mean you you're
51:01
gonna see people wandering along and you're gonna wonder you know they're just going to be communicating and they're gonna be like
51:08
in the street they're starting a fight yeah i think if you flick your wrist it's like you're throwing a punch at
51:13
someone is what it looks like has anyone actually used you know nod to to answer or no to to dismiss is No one ever calls
51:22
me so yeah right moving on to TVOS 26 it has liquid glass and a new profiles API
51:30
moving on to Mac OS time do do we have anything to say about TV
51:37
OS it's it it it's disproportionate because I use it you know every day watching shows but like it gets
51:43
virtually no attention from Apple at all it's it's maybe the biggest amount of disparity there between care and usage
51:51
kind of just want it to get out of the way though right so you can watch your TV programs exact i think that's what's great about it you know if if you use
51:56
the default digital interface in a TV these days it's full of spam and you know I I was reading someone the other
52:02
day who was moaning on Blue Sky about how every time he turns on his TV he gets this like 5-second ad that he can't
52:10
skip and all this stuff is like so annoying and uh you know the great thing about Apple TV as far as I'm concerned
52:17
is that they they don't mess with it and you know I I think there's I'm glad that
52:22
they don't particularly push any of their commercial stuff in there it's just kind of it does one thing and I
52:28
think it does it really well my my friends all think I have like this
52:33
horrible allergy against advertising but I don't feel like I'm the crazy one it's like do you see what's happening like
52:39
you scroll through your phone and you just see ad after ad on Tik Tok you open up your like your crummy Roku TV and
52:44
it's just showing you ads and it goes to the screen saver and it's just showing you ads like it's it's insane like I I I
52:51
don't understand how the rest of the world functions but like I love Roku for for watching TV but the best thing about
52:57
TV OS is the screen savers i mean I me and my wife have sat there and watched screen savers we've literally sat there
53:03
and watched the screen savers because they're so mesmeriic yeah Graeme has them on his TV they're amazing
53:09
yeah the the remarkable thing about TV OS 26 is the fact that it still runs on the
53:15
first Apple like modern Apple TV from 2015 with an A8 chip inside that was the
53:21
chip that was in the iPhone 6 I think and it's still running a fork of iOS you
53:26
know basically iOS 26 which is just insane i think that it's just that first model that doesn't get liquid glass
53:32
because the A8 is just you know too underpowered for that in particular but
53:38
it's remarkable the longevity that device has had but surely surely the hardware is going to be like you know not long for this world because the tvOS
53:45
app you know running everywhere now i mean that's mostly how I interact with it because it's native on my TV and you
53:50
know you can get on uh what do they just roll out for um some new platform forget which but you know the hardware doesn't
53:57
seem to make much sense anymore does it you will have to prize that out of my grubby little mitts i I I love the Apple
54:03
TV because it doesn't have ads and and and you know you you can use like say the the interface that the a Samsung TV
54:10
comes with but you have to disconnect it from the internet because if as soon as you connect your TV to the internet it's
54:15
tracking you every which way and it's spewing all these ads into your into your home and uh Apple TV doesn't do
54:22
that and so to me you know I I I it has genuine value moving on to Mac OS 26
54:29
Tahoe colored folders from Mac OS 7 come back you can color a folder however you
54:34
want you have new continuity features live activities in the phone app uh the
54:39
superpowered spotlight leandandy you're running Mac OS Tahoe how do you feel about it well I like the look of it it
54:45
definitely you know looks really beautiful i haven't used so many features because like I said I couldn't get any work done but uh uh and Charlie
54:52
you know like before were we talking about this one before the show or or during the show no I think we I think we spoke about it just earlier are are we
54:58
excited about Mac OS Taha like I I'm I'm concerned about the liquid glass design
55:05
on the Mac i don't feel like I've been a fan of how Allen Dy has been redesigning the Mac OS interface uh like making all
55:12
the title bars less consistent removing the functionality from you know
55:18
elements like notifications until you hover your mouse over them if they fix that icons
55:24
they did not they did not notifications are still like blank buttons that don't do anything until you hover your cursor
55:30
over them unfortunately um I was kind of hoping like with this I mean it makes sense like they're they're unifying the
55:36
the design style so it's going to be a little bit like less you know
55:41
traditional Mac-like and more more iPad-like bringing them all together like that but um yeah I I'm also not
55:48
convinced on that uh look of the the the new look of the sidebar that's like
55:54
inset and hovering over the the shape of the window and then you have like the traffic light buttons that are inside
55:59
the floating sidebar it it looks a bit weird to me it reminds me of when we had drawers that were like pop out the side
56:05
of windows it's like it's a bit it just I mean it's not the same thing cuz it doesn't stick out the side but in a way
56:10
it's kind of it's annoying thing it's a thing that's there and you want it to go away whereas if you just have a regular sidebar it's part of the part of the
56:17
setup yeah i honestly think the drawers were better are better than like the sidebars that cover up half the content
56:22
of the window you know like in in the music app on the Mac which is just like the epitome of all of their poor design
56:28
choices coming together like you you hit the you hit like the the Q button or like the the uh you know lyrics button
56:35
and if the window isn't big enough it covers up half of the music window and all right well now I just can't browse
56:41
my music while I'm looking at the the lyrics you know if it if it opened up the opposite way then it would make the window bigger and it would expand when
56:48
it needed to i mean that's that that like the whole modularity of the Mac OS interface is what made like classic Mac
56:53
OS great i mean you look at Windows and it's like you know in the file explorer they don't really have an equivalent to
57:00
quicklook but it's like well you know you can turn on the preview pane which makes your entire like explorer window
57:06
smaller all of the time and half of the time when you don't have a file selected it's just showing nothing well I mean
57:12
the whole point of the Mac is it's modular like you know on the Mac you select a file and then you can just hit the space bar and get that quick quick
57:18
look interface you know that that's always been like the the pinnacle of Mac OS user interface design and I feel like
57:24
this this new class of design software designers at Apple are losing sight of that in a in a way yeah I think it's a
57:32
shame as well that you you touched on that that a lot of these new apps are being developed in Catalyst for Mac and
57:38
I don't really understand why Apple's doing that because you know they have unlimited resources and they tell us
57:44
that the future is Swift UI and that you you can write once in Swift UI and then adapt that user interface to all Apple's
57:50
different platforms well why doesn't Apple do that why are they you know porting iOS apps
57:58
to the Mac rather than building native apps with with Swift UI because if if Apple can't be bothered to do that then
58:04
who is going to do that well on the other hand though the messages app on the Mac was terrible until they just
58:09
brought the iPhone one across then it was great so you know the messages app
58:15
lacked all kinds of fe I mean it was fine but it lacked a lot of the features that you would got on um on the on the
58:20
iOS version and then when when they used I guess was it a catalyst version or
58:26
however they did it with um with it was catalyst yeah uh yeah and now you have the same thing and it and I and I
58:34
wouldn't say that I mean Apple has unlimited resources when it comes to money but not in terms of uh hiring you
58:42
know not in terms of engineers necessarily and th you know you know just hiring more engineers to finish a
58:48
project is just makes it take longer uh well that's true but I I I I feel like
58:54
the if you look at what Apple does rather than what they say then the solution is clearly to use Catalyst for
59:00
Mac to port iOS apps to the Mac it's not to actually develop apps from scratch and swift UI i mean the actual like pool
59:08
of you know Mac native developers is shrinking as more people like you know
59:14
learn iOS and swift and swift UI development like the the pool of people who understand like the the next app kit
59:22
APIs and the people who genuinely understand how to build great native Mac
59:28
apps is shrinking yeah or moving to Apple or working for companies that Apple is buying or they're just you know
59:34
indie developers making one-off things like you know Overcast like the actual the actual pool of people who can make
59:41
great Mac apps is is is getting smaller and smaller every year plus they have to live in the Bay Area because Apple refuses to let anybody work work
59:46
remotely now yeah yeah um but as as like these designs are
59:53
converging like granted like the need for people who need to build their Mac app using appkit instead of UI kit
1:00:01
through catalyst or swift UI like the the the difference between those apps is is rapidly shrinking like you know I
1:00:08
haven't used Mac OS Tahoe yet but it seems like you know podcast which was or
1:00:14
you know Apple News like these these early catalyst apps are much more similar to like you know true native Mac
1:00:21
apps because they're they're all just looking the same as each other now do you guys like the new Finder icon people are losing their minds over that
1:00:29
to me all the all the new icons look a bit fuzzy to me you know cuz I think I was playing with this that Apple has
1:00:35
given developers this icon creator tool have you played with that and icon
1:00:40
composer yeah I installed it i I'm surprised that icon composer still runs on Sequoa so I was tooling around with
1:00:46
it a little bit but I I I think when you turn if you take your logo and you stick it onto an icon in liquid glass it just
1:00:53
makes the edges look a bit fuzzy and I I think when you talk about the Finder icon there's to me one of the issues is
1:00:59
low contrasting colors and the other is that the the sort of edges are are a bit
1:01:05
fuzzy and I think it it makes it it it doesn't pop in the way that it used to
1:01:10
and I think that that's actually the the liquid metal tools that they sorry the liquid glass tools they're using to
1:01:15
construct it it looks better on like the actual icon than on than in the icon composer app because in icon composer
1:01:21
you're looking at it like you know blown up filling your screen and so like what's supposed to be like a one pixel
1:01:27
or you know two pixel wide if you have a retina display like that little sheer what's supposed to be that sheer like specular highlight around the edge then
1:01:34
looks a little blurry yeah it does look nicer when I see like actual screenshots of it except the finder face which has
1:01:40
the the colors flipped right why did they do that i can see like what they're
1:01:46
trying to do where like you know the traditionally the left half is blue the right half is white and they're trying
1:01:52
to make like you know the right half of it look like an actual like sort of Picasso face to where you know it could
1:01:57
either be the full face or the one face that's pointing in the direction but they need to flip the colors they could
1:02:03
just reverse the colors of how they have it now and then it would look so much better to all of the old school Mac
1:02:09
people like the rest of us it is awful i'm looking at now it's horrible well
1:02:14
there was a there was a there was also a riot when the first time they changed it was back when uh you know in the 2000
1:02:20
sometime mhm right there was that that that caused people to lose their minds i quite liked it you know like as a little
1:02:26
icon anyway you know on the on the desktop when it's small i thought it looked pretty good i'm not opposed to
1:02:31
like that they're they're the other thing is on the Mac they're forcing all of the icons to be squirles you can't have parts of the icon like breaking the
1:02:38
barrier as you can right now because because they want all of these icons to be unified across the the whole system
1:02:44
and I guess they'd rather just force Mac icons into squirles than allow iOS icons to like break their squirrel shape but
1:02:51
and I don't mind that at all a lot of people are you know upset about that i I think that's okay it's not a big
1:02:57
difference but why did they reverse the color palette it just doesn't make any sense the Finder icon used to be the the
1:03:05
system 7 icon didn't it i think it maybe they introduced it with system 7.1
1:03:10
or something like that and to me it's it it goes back away but it doesn't go back all the way and uh I think they only
1:03:16
introduced it when they when they did the third party licensing of Mac OS so if if you bought like a third party Mac
1:03:23
they didn't want to put an Apple logo on it so they designed this other logo for the Mac OS system and then when Mac OS
1:03:30
10 came out and they had scrapped the third party licensing I they repurposed that Mac logo to become the Finder logo
1:03:37
mhm i've just posted a picture of um previous Finder icons into the into the
1:03:43
Slack chat and it start starts off with well they all look the same like uh the
1:03:51
like the design is the same it's just the colors really have changed around it how the colors work goes from black and white at the first one through various
1:03:59
shiny and lickable versions they they should just flip the colors i'm going to file a feedback about that uh is that
1:04:05
all we have to say about Mac OS oh this is the last Mac OS Tahoe is the last version on Intel Max so pour one out for
1:04:13
your 2020 MacBook Air yeah or your 20 or the Mac
1:04:18
Pro that you bought two years ago for six grand yeah ipad OS 26 we have the the free form
1:04:25
windowing charlie you've tried it out how do you feel i like it i really like it it's way better than um uh what's it
1:04:34
what's it called i've never used it um stage man stage manager that's it i I used I tried to use it a bit i just
1:04:39
found it too annoying it just didn't behave like you wanted it to you know you'd have you'd have to have special
1:04:45
explicitly make special groups of apps and things well let's not talk about that cuz I'm just getting angry but the
1:04:50
uh but the new one uh is really nice i mean it works exactly how you'd think
1:04:55
the uh you launch an app and you it launches full screen but then you can uh
1:05:01
grab the uh the little handle in the corner in the bottom right corner and make it almost any size you want that
1:05:08
depends more uh on the on the app like so some apps still only run in full screen and you can make those into
1:05:14
windows but you can't change the shape of them they still kind of they stay in like portrait or landscape shape uh I
1:05:23
think with iPad OS 26 Apple is uh trying to encourage more developers to
1:05:28
break their apps free of like the fixed size classes like if you update your iPad app for iPad OS 26 they they should
1:05:34
all be eventually like freely resizable well that's a natural extension of what they've been doing for years anyway trying to stop you know trying to make
1:05:41
people so your app you know they if they bring in a new screen size for something then it your app will just work with it
1:05:48
uh yeah the it has the so the things that I really like apart from just being able to arrange your uh windows around
1:05:55
wherever you want and drag and drop between them and or just watch what's going on in the window in the background you know you can see messages coming in
1:06:02
and keep an eye on it while you're reading something else which you could do before you know by in a split screen
1:06:08
or something like that but that was just a that that was a pain the split screen is something or the multitasking stuff
1:06:14
in general is something I always had to switch off on other on friends iPads uh
1:06:19
because they you know they they'd uh drag a link in Safari and instead of like instead of tapping it and then
1:06:25
they'd end up with a little slide over window and they're like how the how do I get rid of this and then they kind of
1:06:31
just give up on it and they'd have all these they have lots of slide overs around well alternate ones so uh then
1:06:38
there's the Mac traffic light buttons the red yellow and green buttons for
1:06:45
Windows which are a little bit weird i like that it's there uh definitely
1:06:50
you know being able to minimize things down but the the So what's the difference between the red one and the
1:06:57
yellow one on the iPad it turns out that uh the red one actually does force quit
1:07:02
the app as if you had you know swiped it up in a in the multitasking view oh
1:07:08
really that's useful to know yeah I think that's it doesn't even do that on the Mac the it just closes the window but keeps the app running so that's
1:07:13
weird yeah this one kind of because Yeah because the behavior is the same if you
1:07:19
press the red one or the yellow one in on the on the iPad OS 26 now they both
1:07:25
just do the same the window disappears uh and one kills the app and one doesn't
1:07:30
apparently it I think the the look of it is a little weird you have the three traffic light buttons but they're
1:07:36
minimized inside like a concentric like panel that they that they sit on top of like they sit on a button and then you
1:07:42
you tap the button and then they get slightly bigger but not actually that much bigger and then you can like tap
1:07:48
them again like why not just have them like the full size all the time i It's It's weird to me that's Alan Dy for you
1:07:54
he he doesn't want you to have anything on the screen anything but content that's it but you do you do still see
1:08:00
them all the time they're just like slightly tiny and inset inside a little i agree that's another thing yeah yeah
1:08:06
that is very annoying i mean it does seem pointless but uh one one thing that's nice about this is when you when
1:08:13
you relaunch an app then it remembers the window position which is actually better than a Mac in some ways that
1:08:19
doesn't always happen uh so you don't it doesn't launch full screen again uh on
1:08:24
this old 2018 iPad Pro you can have four different apps run or four windows
1:08:30
running at the same time any well active anyway any other ones will kind of gray
1:08:35
out in the background so they'll still be there and they'll activate when you use them again the other thing is it's a lot less sluggish uh when with
1:08:43
um like previous efforts it's been very difficult you know the the you've had
1:08:49
two or three apps running and it's really obvious that you don't have enough RAM and it's not you know that app really isn't running but now it
1:08:55
actually feels like the windows are there and the other the final thing that is really good is menus so if you swipe
1:09:02
down from the top one is that that stupid little loge is gone that little kind of bar that was always in the way
1:09:07
of the middle of the top of the screen that's gone now m uh so yeah you swipe down from the top or just or do it with
1:09:14
by um pushing your mouse button up to mouse cursor up to the top and then doing it again uh then the menu shows up
1:09:22
and it's exactly what you'd expect uh a lot of the stuff is not um there like uh
1:09:28
sorry a lot of the stuff is not um I don't know grayed out there are a lot of gray out options even in Apple's apps uh
1:09:36
which I guess is normal but there's sometimes it's a you think well how do I get to this option if I can't get it
1:09:41
from the menu because these are you know these have been taken I guess from the holding down the command key there was a kind of a an apologetic menu in previous
1:09:49
versions of iPad OS why are they grayed out why are a bunch of options grayed out well because you can't because you
1:09:54
can't tap them same as on the Mac menu bar you know right but that doesn't make any sense well if you haven't got something on your clipboard then you
1:10:00
can't paste it right so it so the past the paste option is still there but you just you know just
1:10:06
grayed out um and even so like before like the the the ability to add like keyboard shortcuts and like menu the
1:10:14
ability to build like a menu bar set of commands on the iPad was kind of an
1:10:19
obscure feature before and I can't imagine like a lot of apps have like really taken full advantage of that no plus that Yeah plus it's not up there
1:10:25
all the time and that's where this this feature set is coming from mhm i have a theory just going quickly back to the traffic lights that um I think that
1:10:32
might indicate that with the next generation of iPads they're going to have a finger hover feature so it
1:10:39
doesn't make sense when you have to tap twice to to bring up the the traffic
1:10:44
lights but I think it might be indicative that some of these controls that zoom will will be neat when you
1:10:50
have a finger hover so as you your finger gets closer to the screen then some controls get larger and give you
1:10:56
additional options and so that to me I think is a clue of where where they're going because one of the the issues is
1:11:03
they're trying here to make the iPad OS Mac-like but because you've got big
1:11:09
stubby fingers rather than a a precise pointer then the controls are much bigger and when I see
1:11:16
when I see the iPad Pro running uh iPad OS 26 in this multi-wind mode it looks
1:11:22
like a a Mac with a tiny screen because the controls are so vast relative to the size of the windows and I think if they
1:11:29
introduce a kind of finger hover gesture that sort of enlarges the controls that your finger is going towards that might
1:11:35
be some way that they're actually going to salvage a little bit of screen space so I I thought it might be a clue of where where they're going with their
1:11:43
How would it know about your finger hovering though i think actually there's some electrostatic uh things that you
1:11:49
can detect with finger proximity to a sensor so I think you could do it that way
1:11:54
one thing Well it does with Apple Pencil doesn't it yeah and Yeah and if you use a menu a mouse or you know the magic
1:12:00
keyboard with the trackpad you got the hover yeah yeah you Well you and if you mouse over the the stop the traffic
1:12:06
lights they they automatically you know get bigger you don't have to tap those one thing that Graeme asked me about um
1:12:13
when I was uh like a couple of days ago when I was trying this out is whether or not you can drag and drop things onto
1:12:19
app icons in the dock of the iPad now and I tried
1:12:24
um I just dragged a photo from my Mac's desktop across onto the iPad you know this with continuity
1:12:30
and dropped the photo onto the uh preview icon of the new preview app on and it just opens wow oh wow it's pretty
1:12:38
neat it opens the preview app i mean it doesn't always open the the the the picture but maybe that's a bug or maybe
1:12:45
it's not going to work okay you mentioned that you can have like four apps on screen until like the the the
1:12:51
fifth app in the background becomes like grayed out i do know that that scales with how much RAM your iPad has so if
1:12:58
you have an iPad with more gigabytes of RAM you can have more i think if you have one of the new ones with 8 gigabytes of RAM you can have 12 windows
1:13:04
active at once yeah yeah i've read on a a discussion thread somewhere about
1:13:10
that yeah somebody was using like an M4 iPad and they they they didn't you know
1:13:16
they had so many on their screen that it was ridiculous they you know you couldn't see them all anyway
1:13:21
i think they might have nailed it with with iPad OS 26 i think uh Charlie and I
1:13:27
often have arguments about iPad because I like iPad the way that it was and I felt like Charlie always wanted iPad to
1:13:33
be like a Mac and so when I heard about this I thought I'm worried if they're
1:13:38
going to ruin the iPad by making it like a Mac but from what I've seen I think that they've maybe found I think it's
1:13:45
maybe the best thing that they announced at WWDC this week and it's the smartest thing that they've done because somehow
1:13:50
I think they've managed to preserve the simplicity of iPad OS for people that want to have that full window experience
1:13:57
plus added this stuff for people that want it to be a bit more Mac-like and I could almost imagine that I might use it
1:14:03
both ways because you know I they both appeal to me and so I I think they've really nailed it exactly yeah my limit
1:14:09
in my limited you know uh 3 hours experience of it that's exactly what I did you know you can have it both ways
1:14:15
and is good to be able to switch between them yeah and you just switch by by dragging the window to full screen again
1:14:20
or tapping the the green button and you're back in Yeah yeah yeah yeah it's works really nicely
1:14:27
what I've always disliked about Stage Manager is that it feels like running Stage Manager just wastes a lot of
1:14:33
screen space especially if you only have like the 11in iPad like you know you can't have really three apps entirely on
1:14:39
screen at once because it leaves that white area around them and it tries to rearrange the windows for you i've
1:14:44
always said that like what I want is I just want like a more supercharged split screen view because at that time I never
1:14:51
believed that they would actually go and implement the full Mac OS thing but like this is even better than that because
1:14:57
you can especially with the with the the gestures that make it super easy to tile
1:15:02
windows you know you can just throw one window on the left half of the screen one on the right half of the screen then
1:15:08
you can like drag it up and to be a quarter and like fill the other quarters like this is this is much better than I ever thought they would do
1:15:15
what happened to the um the rumor that uh they were going to do something similar with the iPhone though you plug your iPhone into a into an external
1:15:20
monitor and then it would it would bring up like a little mini Mac OS for you so I was rid of that absolutely nothing huh
1:15:28
they did absolutely nothing does not exist dream on could still happen and on that note
1:15:35
maybe we should switch over to the prediction game results oh yeah let's do that so last week we dropped down our
1:15:43
predictions for the event and we have to judge our results you can find this table if you're listening if you just go
1:15:50
to my website decovjones.com there'll be a link in the show notes where you can bring up the all of our
1:15:55
results and see them laid out but we're going to run through them a little quick here oh boo
1:16:01
starting with the software section um all of us voted for these things all of us get points glassy vision OS
1:16:09
inspired redesign across all platforms yes all OS versions numbers all OS
1:16:14
version numbers updated to 26 ipad OS gets menu bar and improved windowing features all points across the board
1:16:21
moving on iOS also gets free external displays you know really quickly and
1:16:28
then I'm like oh no oh no please why don't we just Why don't we just jump to
1:16:33
the bottom ios also gets free form windowing and external displays no Lewis is the only person who voted against
1:16:38
that all of us were fooled lewis comes out ahead there ios lets users choose
1:16:44
app icon shapes so they did slightly change the radius of the squirkle it is
1:16:50
slightly rounder than before not the dramatic thing that was rumored but no they don't let you choose the shape so a
1:16:55
few of us lost that game center reinvented as Apple Games
1:17:01
they did introduce a new thing called Apple Games but Game Center is still called Game Center so
1:17:08
[Music] where's Ed Hardy i need Ed Hardy where's Ed Hardy exactly
1:17:14
next version of Mac OS is called Mac OS Tahoe yes support dropped for all Intel Macs no but they did announce that this
1:17:20
will be the last one uh Vision OS gets over five minutes of screen time i counted Vision OS got eight minutes of
1:17:27
screen time wow so I got a point there and that was actually So everybody else voted against
1:17:33
that except for me and that was actually one of the uh points where a majority of
1:17:38
our audience disagreed with us i think over 80% of our listeners also thought that Vision OS would get more screen
1:17:44
time um the Apple Intelligence section uh was a little poor here apple
1:17:51
reintroduces smarter agentic Siri they did say that they're still working on it but you know kicked it down the can
1:17:58
another another year redesigned Health Apps AI powered recommendations thankfully no airpods get live
1:18:05
translation everything else got live translation except for AirPods that's it everywhere else so heartbreaking maybe
1:18:12
points to an upcoming AirPods release uh no new hardware we all get a lot of
1:18:19
points for that event opens with a silly light-hearted video yes apple plays a trailer for the
1:18:25
F1 movie boy did they it wasn't really a trailer was it but they showed off
1:18:34
exclusive footage from the movie and I think that counts as a trailer all right then
1:18:39
apple name drops another big game coming to the Mac they name dropped many of them event runs over 1 hour 45 minutes
1:18:45
no it was a pretty crisp 95 minutes if you include that weird extra video at
1:18:51
the end so the scores are Leander with 11 Graham and I with 13 Charlie with 14
1:18:58
Lewis with 15 congratulations Lewis yes
1:19:03
we have even though I got robbed on the one huh so our listeners a lot of listeners
1:19:10
submitted they always questions with 18 points michael Dennis and Ian
1:19:17
Williamson are two listener winners well done and they had Wow they had this to
1:19:22
say there's a spot on the forum where they can plug something or promote them in the case that they win a lot of
1:19:28
people wrote lovely messages for us but a lot of people didn't win only these two people did so Michael Dennis says
1:19:34
"If you're reading this I guess it means I'm a second time winner." And that is true ian Williamson says "I'm playing
1:19:41
trombone for the P pogues." Pagues i'm playing trombone for the Pogues us
1:19:48
Canada tour in September come to a gig oh wow really that's badass that's wild
1:19:53
oh is is that a famous band at our Come on is that a famous band you can you can
1:19:59
poke my home right okay well it's Williamson and the Pogues
1:20:07
yeah we're not going to spell that out okay i'll I'll look it up after class
1:20:14
oh any final thoughts did anyone watch the F1 haptic trailer
1:20:20
I did yeah looks fun what did you think of it the The trailer looks neat but I I'm I'm not terribly excited about the
1:20:26
movie it looks kind of generic but the trailer was cool what about the haptic part that you know your iPhone vibrating
1:20:32
oh yeah yeah that that was neat i thought it was fine i mean it's definitely a you know gimmicky but uh I
1:20:38
like Leander's idea of them making it so it works during the movie and you just you sit on your uh phone during the
1:20:44
movie return of the Tangler people watch movies on their phones you'd be surprised
1:20:51
well I think that about wraps it up that's all the cult we have for you all this week but the fun continues lewis
1:20:57
Wallace is on Twitter at Lewis Wallace leander Kenny is at Elcany and you can read the his daily thoughts in the cult
1:21:04
of Macto today newsletter which you can find at newsletters.cultac.com
1:21:09
thanks to Graham Bower and Charlie Serell for joining us again graham Bau is on blue sky at Graham Bower charlie
1:21:14
Sell is Mr charlie on Masttodon and you can hear them together on the Apple cord podcast i'm on Mastadon and Blue Sky at
1:21:22
DGJones and you can join the weeklong discussion with me and the other devs on the Cult Club Discord by going to
1:21:28
support.theultcast.com you can read all of our WWDC coverage and all of the articles we've talked
1:21:34
about in the show notes and at cultmack.com uh this has been the Cultcast the best
1:21:39
30 plus minute Apple conversation you're going to hear all week long new episodes of the Cultcast come out every Thursday night we'll have more special guests
1:21:46
next week maybe some of these people will come back maybe they won't maybe I'll have to find a random stranger on
1:21:51
the internet to come and fill in i want to thank everyone for listening and for watching and we will see you all next
1:21:57
time have a great weekend say goodbye everybody bye see you bye
1:22:03
so that's Colt Cast 702 703 703
1:22:11
i got so annoyed by that every single tag of every single segment of the show
1:22:18
so that's iOS 26 or what show is that i haven't been
1:22:24
listening to this show no the keynote keynote every single thing
1:22:31
that was that was your Craig Federigi impression well it was it's every synthetic uh presenter they have so
1:22:39
that's Yeah and we can't wait for you to try it they're really impatient over there
1:22:46
[Music]