NC_2024_09_08
The episode explores user permissions challenges post-Apple updates, highlighting frustrations with frequent re-confirmations affecting productivity tools. The host advocates for longer grace periods and encourages constructive tech community dialogue.
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Long Summary
In this episode, I delve into a particularly intriguing topic: user permissions and privacy in the context of software developments, focusing on a recent shakeup stemming from Apple's updates in the Sequoia beta. I recount my personal experiences and frustrations after returning from a three-week hiatus, particularly with the unexpected permission dialogues popping up for screen recording. This turned out to be part of a wider change by Apple, where they instituted a system requiring users to re-confirm permissions for screen recording in apps weekly, or even after logging in and restarting the Mac.
Highlighting the brilliance—or perhaps the absurdity—of this new policy, I discuss how essential productivity tools, such as CleanShot, Keyboard Maestro, and Adobe Photoshop, found themselves caught in a whirlwind of constantly nagging permission requests. I explore the reactions from developers who are understandably concerned that this approach might lead to unwarranted suspicion of their apps, ultimately harming reputations and increasing the burden of support necessary to ease user frustrations.
As I detail further, it becomes evident that the policy may stem from a well-intended desire to protect users from potentially malicious software. However, what this translate into in practice is a series of dialogues that can easily overwhelm and annoy users, turning them into passive participants merely clicking through blocks to return to their workflows. Through this lens, I advocate for a more sensible approach that would allow for a longer grace period after the initial installation of an app, rather than subjecting users to repetitive prompts that can misinterpret their experiences as negligent.
I also reflect on the importance of constructive criticism, particularly in tech communities where dialogue and feedback should prioritize tangible solutions rather than venting frustration. The episode culminates in a call to action for listeners to engage in constructive discussions around user permissions, and urge Apple to reconsider the implications of such permissions on productivity and user experience.
Overall, this deep dive into app permissions aims to spark awareness about the delicate balance between security and usability that developers must navigate while also emphasizing the importance of feedback in driving meaningful changes within the tech industry.
Highlighting the brilliance—or perhaps the absurdity—of this new policy, I discuss how essential productivity tools, such as CleanShot, Keyboard Maestro, and Adobe Photoshop, found themselves caught in a whirlwind of constantly nagging permission requests. I explore the reactions from developers who are understandably concerned that this approach might lead to unwarranted suspicion of their apps, ultimately harming reputations and increasing the burden of support necessary to ease user frustrations.
As I detail further, it becomes evident that the policy may stem from a well-intended desire to protect users from potentially malicious software. However, what this translate into in practice is a series of dialogues that can easily overwhelm and annoy users, turning them into passive participants merely clicking through blocks to return to their workflows. Through this lens, I advocate for a more sensible approach that would allow for a longer grace period after the initial installation of an app, rather than subjecting users to repetitive prompts that can misinterpret their experiences as negligent.
I also reflect on the importance of constructive criticism, particularly in tech communities where dialogue and feedback should prioritize tangible solutions rather than venting frustration. The episode culminates in a call to action for listeners to engage in constructive discussions around user permissions, and urge Apple to reconsider the implications of such permissions on productivity and user experience.
Overall, this deep dive into app permissions aims to spark awareness about the delicate balance between security and usability that developers must navigate while also emphasizing the importance of feedback in driving meaningful changes within the tech industry.
Brief Summary
In this episode, I tackle the challenges surrounding user permissions and privacy, ignited by Apple's recent Sequoia beta updates. Sharing my frustrations with new screen recording permissions that require frequent re-confirmations, I highlight the impact on productivity tools like CleanShot and Adobe Photoshop. While aimed at enhancing security, these changes often overwhelm users and risk damaging developer reputations. I advocate for a more user-friendly solution, suggesting longer grace periods for permissions, and call for constructive dialogue in tech communities to address these pressing concerns.
Tags
user permissions
privacy
Apple
Sequoia beta updates
screen recording
productivity tools
CleanShot
Adobe Photoshop
security
user-friendly solutions
Transcript
[0:00]
NC_2024_09_08
[0:00]Music.
[0:08]Bias. Today is Sunday, September 8th, 2024, and this is show number 1009. Well, the live audience will know that it took me three or maybe four takes to get that introduction right, and it's actually written for me. So that shows you how rusty I am, us having been gone for three weeks. Speaking of which, how great of a job did Alistair, Bart, and Jill do on keeping the Nocilicast going for the last three weeks? Seriously, weren't those shows fantastic? Fantastic? Now, I'm not sure I'll ever get as nerdy as Alistair in programming my Hue hubs, but I'm glad he went down that route. I was one of the two thumbs up for Hue people when he was choosing a platform. I also really appreciated Ed's Expanso review to help Alistair out doing his show. Now, I just happened to listen to Alistair's description of the Manta sleep masks while wearing one of those throwaway sleep masks on a plane, and I think I'm going to be buying one of those mantas for greater comfort. In fact, I just put it on my wish list for Christmas. I also thought his cable management tools were pretty interesting because who amongst us doesn't love yet another way to try to manage our cables?
[1:16]Now, when Bart explained how he uses the Clix keyboard for iPhone to type the show notes, it sounded really tempting. The only problem I have with the idea is that I trip so frequently, I simply can't be trusted to go on my walks and and type the way he does. Now, I was able to hear Kurt's fabulous review of Termius as a terminal for the iPad before I left on my trip. Now, I'd tried Termius before, and I could never get it to do anything. Armed with Kurt's instructions, I finally got it to work, and it's been really fun.
[1:47]When Bart described how lonely he is doing security bits, he sure made me feel like a valuable part of the segment, and I'm always amazed that he feels that way because I thought it was great without me, but I guess that's what makes us such a great team is we both appreciate what the other one brings to the table. Now, Bart and Alistair have been subbing for me for years, and not to discount how hard it is for them to do it, but this being Jill's first time, I have to say she sounded like she'd done it a hundred times. It made me happy when she complimented my documentation to set them up for success. I've been updating my Folga guides every year, so I don't have to do it from scratch, but a lot of stuff did change from last year. Folga as a documentation tool made it easy to swap in new screenshots where the interface and the tools had changed or the way I used them had changed. It's a great app for making guides. Now, I'm fascinated by the Elgato prompter Jill described, which is why I encouraged her to go even deeper into how it works. I still don't think it would help me for what I do, but I love the idea. I was really interested in Jill's explanation of the app PulsePoint that helps people connect with people in their community during emergencies. I'm one of those people who would just love to be the hero to help somebody out. I haven't had recent CPR training. Maybe if I got into it, it would motivate me to get that updated. Happy Scale also sounds like something else I'd like. A non-judgy, happier way to track my weight? That would be great!
[3:09]I also love the way Jill shared her personal journey on weight loss, and that's part of the power of her podcast. She shares her personal path, and that really makes it, that might sound stupid to say, makes it sound very personal and makes it very relatable.
[3:23]Finally, I have to thank longtime contributor and good friend George from Tulsa for his interesting explanation of how the people he supports went to Linux and then back to the Mac. I love his contributions, especially since he and I don't often see things the same way, and that's the best kind of content. And the only thing I have to complain about about the three hosts is that none of them plugged their own work. I realize that was my mistake. My written instructions from Folga do not include self-promotion. I'm going to have to correct that for future trips, but let's rectify this situation right now, shall we? Alistair has everything he does online listed it at zcarj.me. That's z-k-a-r-j.me, or as he would say, z-k-a-r-j.me. That's where he includes a pointer to his most recent work in photography at justbirds.photo. Now, Bart's fabulous podcast, Let's Talk Photography and Let's Talk Apple, are both hosted at let's-talk.ie. If you want a more expansive review of everything he does, including his photography, head over to bartb.ie. Now, Jill from the Northwoods is a podcasting machine. The best way to find her content is by going to abetterlifeinsmallsteps.com. In addition to the blog her friend hosts, on the right side of that page, you'll see her podcast Start With Small Steps, Buzz Blossom and Squeak, Small Steps With God, and The Bible in Small Steps. There's something for everyone there.
[4:51]So one more time, I can't possibly thank Alistair, Bart, and Jill enough for providing fun, interesting, and informative content to the NoCillaCast audience while Steve and I gallivanted around our seventh continent. And of course, there's a link in the show notes to everything that I just described for their work. Speaking of Bart, did you like that little bumper music he used to break up the segments of the show that you just heard? Well, I've been wanting to do that for a long time, but I never found the right music. It had to be short and catchy. And you know what? I actually love Bart's choice. So unless somebody objects, I'm going to do it on the show from now on.
[5:34]
Apple Event - Join Us
[5:34]Tomorrow, Monday, September 9th at 10 a.m. Pacific time, Apple will be conducting their annual iPhone event this year entitled Glow Time. During the event, the Nosilla Castaways will gather in the live chat room at podfee.com slash chat to text about the event. Steve and I are never on video or audio during these events because we don't want to distract from what we're all there to learn. I hope you'll consider joining us.
[6:02]
Tech on Travel – the Africa Edition
[6:02]When Steve and I retired, people asked us if we planned to travel. We immediately said no. Evidently, we were wrong. We've really enjoyed traveling all around the world, and our recent trip to Africa was our seventh continent. We went to South Africa, Zimbabwe, way, Zambia and Botswana. Every time we take one of these long, complex trips to distant lands, I learn more about how to deal with the tech challenges on travel. This year was no exception. So let's talk about tech on travel, the Africa edition. Now, this isn't going to be a coherent story, but rather just a series of observations and solutions. Now, starting many years ago, whenever we were preparing for one of the more complex vacations, I created a diagram of the entire trip. I use a free web-based app from Diagrams.net to create these diagrams. I started making these diagrams when we went to the Galapagos Islands, then to two cities in Peru, and finally to hike Machu Picchu in southern Peru. When I diagrammed out this trip, I discovered that in two instances the travel agent hadn't arranged any flights for us. In her written documentation, we just magically appeared in a new city. When I queried her on this, she said, oh yeah, like you're supposed to book those. To which I answered, exactly when were you going to tell me that, sweetie? Also, I said, no, no, you're booking them. I don't know how to book travel and flights in Peru.
[7:25]Anyway, when we went to the United Arab Emirates, India, and Nepal, the diagram I created there was invaluable in answering the constant immigration questions because we were going in and out of countries all the time. And they ask you, where have you been? Where are you staying? And for how long? I was able to just hand them the diagram and they knew immediately where we were going, where we'd been and how long we were staying.
[7:46]Now, since our trip to Africa was going to go through four countries with multiple inter-country flights and nine different accommodations, the diagram was again invaluable. On my diagrams, I have kind of a standard formatting. I use light blue gradient boxes for the name of where we're going, such as Kruger National Park. In a yellow box next to each location, I put the name of the accommodations, such as Umbaba Eco Lodge, along with the date range and the day numbers. I use is day numbers because the travel agents usually provide the day's activities based on a day number because it's kind of a generic form thing that they've built and they don't know exactly what day you're going to be there but they know a day number. Now an arrowed line takes us from location to location and next to each arrowed line is a blue circle with a white number in it. This number allows you to follow the bouncing ball on the diagram. If there's a flight to be taken between locations there's a green box with the date and flight number. Often these flights cross days so the departure time and date are on one end, and arrival date and time on the other end. I had Ron and Steve check me as I built the diagram, and they found errors that I was able to correct. So by the time we got home, I was on revision H. This diagram was invaluable, as I said, as we worked our way through four countries, including the unplanned trip to Zambia. That's where we went across the Victoria Falls and actually swam at the edge of the waterfall. fall.
[9:10]Anyway, we pulled it out before flights to find our flight numbers, we pulled it out to remember what day we were on, we pulled it out to write our letters and social media posts, we pulled it out to figure out how to spell Karwangwe, and we pulled it out for immigration. We also gave it to our friends and family so they knew where we were in case of emergency. I put a copy of the diagram in the article so you can see how it looks, and if you're interested in copying it for a trip, you might go on. I'll be glad to share the original file with you for you to modify.
[9:38]An important tip for a trip out of the country is to make sure you set all of your important travel documents to be stored locally on the mobile device you'll be traveling with. Steve and I use Google Drive for all of our travel documents like flight confirmations, itineraries, proof of travel insurance, and the all-important diagram. Before departure, we opened that drive on our phones and our Macs and on my iPad, and we told Google Drive to make all of them available locally. That's a really important tip.
[10:07]Now, the majority of the big trips we've been on have been organized by the UCLA Alumni Association. On these trips, the vast majority of the people we meet use iPhones. I remember being on the ship in Antarctica, and after we'd been out for a day's adventures with the penguins, everyone would collect in the cocktail lounge and use AirDrop to send photos to each other. Even when we went up to Brazil to see Iguazu Falls, it was the guide who showed us the fastest way to turn on AirDrop for everyone. If you want to know how to do this, I'm just going to give you his tip right now. Swipe down from the upper right to get to Control Center. Then press and hold in the middle of the section that shows Wi-Fi and Cellular. Now, don't press on any of the icons, just in the middle of that box. Then you'll see an icon that says AirDrop Contacts Only, or it might say Receiving Off. If you tap that, you can change it to Everyone for 10 minutes. It's a much faster way than having to drill down and figure out where the heck that's hidden inside Settings. All right.
[11:03]Moving on, our trip to Africa was managed by G Adventures, which manages tours for National Geographic. With this trip, we were surprised to find the mix of Android and iPhone to be about 50-50. We also found a vast array of camera quality on the Android phones. At Victoria Falls, two women saw our buddy Ron take a cool, artsy photo of us with the falls in the background, and they asked me to take those same pictures for them. Their cameras were dreadful, and I mean seriously bad. I could not come close to exposing both them and the falls in the background. They seemed really happy with the photos I took, but I felt kind of bad for them. Now, on the other hand, a couple of people had snazzy, newish Android phones, and their cameras were fantastic. I noticed that both the Android and iPhone users all use pinch-to-zoom to take photos. Now, we know that pinching-to-zoom and going between camera magnifications actually does a kind of a digital interpolation, not purely optical. but you know what they were very happy with their photos so I didn't say a word.
[12:04]Having a mix of Android and iPhones presented a bit of a challenge sending photos back and forth since we couldn't use AirDrop. Now, the solution was the cross-platform app WhatsApp. I know folks outside of the U.S. use this for pretty much all text communication, but in our circles, we don't know anyone who uses it. Luckily, I already had it installed on my phone, and I was already logged in, so when the guide made us our first WhatsApp group for that segment been to the tour, I got to play along with everyone. However, Steve did not have it on his iPhone. No worries, a quick download and he should be sorted. But there was a problem. In order to get into WhatsApp, you must register your phone number and then be able to receive a text on that number. Well, since we are in foreign lands and we use AT&T, which charges pretty close to the cost of a kidney to use your number overseas, we had gotten eSIMs for travel. If you haven't ever done this before, it's really pretty easy. We went to a service called eSIMDB and we looked up the countries where we were going and chose a duration and amount of data that we expected would meet our needs. We chose a company called GigSky, which we used with success in Argentina.
[13:12]Once you choose a company and get a discount code from eSIMDB, you download their app and actually buy a plan. The plan we chose was 10GB gigabytes for 30 days for around 25 bucks. Now, AT&T is $20 per day per device. To be fair, we chose data only, not voice through GigSky, since we didn't think we'd use voice and it would have been much more expensive.
[13:41]Mike Price from the chat room just pointed out that you could consider switching to T-Mobile because he says they have a gallbladder only version of the options for international travel. It is a better deal. A couple of people on the trip had done on that. Anyway, the app that you download, like the GigSky app, it installs the eSIM for you, but there's a lot of toggles and switches to make it work just right. I wouldn't say it's hard for a geek, but it is a bit challenging if your nerd muscles aren't flexed. So now, here's Steve with a data-only eSIM from GigSky, and he needs a text sent to his home cell phone number in order to play with the cool kids on WhatsApp. We toggled on his home line for data, and we tried to ask for the code, but it didn't come through. Afraid of causing a house payment-sized charge from AT&T, we turned it off. About an hour later, it came through. We rushed into WhatsApp and plugged that number in, but of course it had expired by then. We tried several times with no joy. Now, a couple of days later, we tried again, and I do not know what was different, but this time he was able to get the code quickly and get into WhatsApp. He was so happy to get to play with the cool kids.
[14:49]Now, the takeaways here are to get an eSIM to save money on travel and yet stay connected. But also, if you're traveling out of your own country and you're not already a WhatsApp user, be sure to install it and get it connected to your phone number before you leave. Now, back on the eSIM subject, you don't have to buy nearly as much data as we did. I actually ran out of my 10 gigabytes, but Steve let me tether off his phone for the last couple of days because he had extra, and our buddy Ron, who was traveling with us, didn't even run out of his data either. The interesting thing about the eSIM was that while GeekSky worked flawlessly, it did not cover the country of Zimbabwe. I don't know what it is about the network in Zimbabwe, but none of the companies that covered the rest of Africa included Zimbabwe. Now, we bought two different eSIMs. They were each like $9 for seven days that said they worked in Zimbabwe, but neither of them worked. So there's just something strange about the Zimbabwe network. And one more thought on not having access to your phone number while on travel. Make sure you pay all of your bills before you go, because financial services often use text messaging as a second-factor authentication to verify you're you. Without access to SMS on that line, you may not be able to get in.
[16:03]Almost everyone on this trip brought only their phones and smartwatches with them. You'll be shocked to find that Steve and I brought slightly more tech than the rest of the group. Steve brought his 14-inch MacBook Pro, a big boy camcorder, and his Insta360 X3 camera. I carried my 13-inch M2 MacBook Air, my 13-inch iPad Pro with Apple Pencil, and my big girl camera, the Olympus EM5 Mark II mirrorless camera with a 300mm effective zoom lens. Looking back, I didn't use my iPad Pro hardly at all. I use it for cross-stitching, which sounds it's funny, but using Apple Pencil to mark off what I've done on a pattern is dreamy. I also use it to watch video podcasts, especially Daily Tech News Show. But you know what? I didn't have the bandwidth to download any podcasts, and I had no downtime to cross-stitch, so the iPad Pro went largely unused.
[16:53]While we're on our big vacations, I send an email travelogue every day, including photos and color commentary on what I've seen. Much to my surprise, more than 100 people have chosen to be on distribution for this letter. If it sounds fun to you after I describe it, feel free to shoot me an email with the address you'd like to use to receive it. My promise to readers is that I won't give you a lot of factual information, I'll make silly and snide comments, and the pictures will be entertaining. painting. Now, you might ask, why don't I just bring my iPad on these trips? It turns out the letter is nearly impossible to do on the iPad.
[17:29]Multitasking is clumsy at best, and embedding photos and text and email is super hard trying to move them back in and out on the iPad. I tried doing this on the long bus rides in Chile when we were driving between observatories, and it was not fun at all. Having the light and thin MacBook Air for the task was delightful this year. In order to to talk about the letter, I need to talk about photo management on a trip like this and talk a little bit about backups. When Steve and I are at home with our Fios internet service, syncing photos from our phones to our Mac is a seamless process. We also use shared photo library when we're away from home. We like it because now we don't care who takes a photo as we know we'll both have access to it in photos. We used to compete and take the same photo and that was just silly. However, on On challenging networks, the whole syncing of the phones to the Mac, the photos, it's not practical. When we went to Antarctica, we were forced to share photos back and forth manually, and we kept using AirDrop to move them while we were in our cabin, and we would import them into our photos library. The result, when we got back home, was massive duplication of images. I went through them all twice, and I deleted all the duplicates, but they all came back. so I've just, ship has sailed, Antarctica, half my photos are duplicated. On this trip, I was bound and determined not to have this happen. In locations with poor internet service, I needed a better plan.
[18:56]Steve primarily took photos on his iPhone, and I primarily took photos using my big girl camera. When I needed a photo from his phone, I did have him airdrop it to me on my Mac rather than my iPhone because I could force it to save to the finder instead of going into photos. It's possible you could do that on the iPhone now that I think about it. You might be able to do it into files, but then files would have to sync to get it to my Mac in order to get it in my letters, so that wouldn't work anyway. So yeah, I airdropped them to my Mac into the Finder. I kept these images in a delete me folder in Finder, knowing that eventually when I got on good internets, his images would come into our shared photo library.
[19:33]I was particularly proud of how I managed the large raw plus JPEG photos I took with my big girl camera. You can imagine that I took just a few more photos than necessary to keep, capturing giraffes, elephants, antelope, the lilac-breasted roller, which was my favorite bird, cheetahs and lions, not to mention dozens more of animals. For every sighting of an animal, I took dozens of photos. Bart has taught us the importance of trimming down the photos we keep, but barting this many photos was going to be very hard. Instead of dragging all of the images into Apple Photos from my memory card via an SD card to USB-C adapter, I first dragged them into folders by date on my Mac. An important part of this process was to make sure those folders of images was not in any location that would try to sync with the cloud. If they went on the desktop in Documents and Dropbox or Google Drive, then I'd have caused myself massive bandwidth issues.
[20:28]At this point, I have one backup of my big girl camera photos on my Mac. So I've got them on the memory card still, and now I've got a copy on my Mac. So that's good. I've got a backup. But we learned from our trip to the Galapagos in Peru that having a backup that's in the same bag where you carry the original, that's not really like a backup. Steve's backpack was stolen in Peru, and it included his cameras and his laptop. Luckily, on that trip, in a rare moment of foresight, I'd gotten us both SSD backup drives. I had us run backups on those drives before we left for the trip home, and most importantly, I carried Steve's backup drive in my backpack, and he carried mine. Rather than having lost all of the photos and videos that he took on an adventure of a lifetime, all he lost was stuff. Well, and his passport, but that's a whole other plot line. Needless to say, I will never travel without swapping backup drives again. So to add to the process I described about moving the photos from my bigger camera to my Mac, I then added them to my backup drive and I would hand it back to Steve. And that would remind him to run his own backups and hand me his backup drive. We swapped it every single day. Back in the previous adventure, we'd only done it once. We did it at the right time. But on this trip, man, we just, we did it every single time. Every day, I should say.
[21:49]Our last big adventure on this trip was in an amazing place called the Okavango Delta. Our accommodations were at a place called Moremi Crossing. This place was a series of tent cabins with views over the water where warthogs, elephants, giraffes, hippos, and antelope played and well ate each other and stuff. But anyway, the tents were really, really nice. You'd probably call it glamping. The other thing about Moremi Crossing is they want you to really embed yourself self and the environment and really experience your surroundings. So they only turn on the internet twice a day for them to download and upload billing information and check for emergencies, that sort of thing. We had no internet for three full days. As you can imagine, I was trepidatious at the concept of not having internet for three days, but as you can also imagine, we loved it. Not having internet did mean that photos I took on my iPhone would not go up to the cloud for those three days. What if I lost my phone? I noodled this for a bit and I came up with a way to back them up too. I connected my phone via USB-C to my Mac, I launched the application Image Capture that's located inside Applications Utilities, and I exported the day's photos into a big pile in a non-syncing backup folder on my Mac. And of course, I backed that folder up to to my backup drive. I was really proud of thinking of this idea.
[23:12]Now think about all the people who traveled only with their phones. It just gives me a cold chill to think of not having backups of all those precious memories.
[23:21]All right, now that I had all the photos from the big girl camera on the Mac, rather than drag them all into photos and then delete the ones I didn't want to keep, I came up with a much better process inspired by our buddy Ron. Since I took both RAW and JPEG, there were two of every file. I tapped on the first JPEG in the day's listing, and I hit the spacebar to open it in Quick Look. So let's say it's of a goop of elephants, and this one's a pretty good shot. I then hit the down arrow on my keyboard twice. I needed to skip over the raw version of the photo because those take forever to come up, and plus it would look exactly like the JPEG. And then I'd look at the next picture. Chances are it's of the same group of elephants. I kept tapping the arrow key twice until I'm done looking at all this section of elephant photos. I chose the best of the series that I considered worthy of pulling into photos. I could drag it right then into photos, but that would interrupt the flow of choosing the best one, and it would also be hard to keep track of which one had I pulled in, because these just have weird image numbers on them, so how do I keep track of which ones I've already pulled in?
[24:25]My solution was to use tags. I'm not a big old tagger, but it's the perfect way to add just a dot of color next to a file name to designate it as a keeper. I don't remember how I learned this, but it turns out you can tag using a keystroke. Using the control key and adding numbers one to seven, you can set a tag by color. One is red, two is orange, three is yellow, four is light green, five is dark green, six is purple, and seven is gray. I'm a fan of light green, so I use control 4 on the keeper images. The cool thing is you don't have to get out a quick look for this to work. So I kept the finder window to the side of quick look so I could verify the green dot had been applied to the photo I was looking at. By the way if you miss tag a file like you hit control 4 and they go oh that's not the best one you can hit the same control number again to erase that tag. So control 4 would undo that tag or control 0 erases all tags. Now Now, after my little green tags had been applied to the JPEG, I used command-click to select each pair of images, RAW plus JPEG, and then I dragged all of those selected items into Photos.
[25:32]Now, in Photos, you can have the RAW and the JPEG, but they come in as one file, and then when you're editing, you can have it edit the RAW photo. So, it's kind of the best of both worlds. Now, before I pull all these best of the best of the best, sir, images in, I should mention that I pre-created albums by date and event name so I'd be able to find the images later. In photos, you only see that one image, like I said, so that gave me the access to the best version of each photo. Repeating this process let me quickly triage a giant pile of photos into just the best of the best. It was so successful that I usually pulled in no more than 30% of the photos I'd taken that day. In one case, I'd taken 130 photos and I only brought in 30. I know for a fact that if I dragged them all in and then gotten rid of which ones I didn't like so much, I would have had an awful lot more in there.
[26:24]Once I had the big girl camera images in a folder in Apple Photos, I wanted to make sure they would sync over to Steve through Shared Photo Library. While my iPhone's camera automatically puts them into the Shared Library, the imported images don't get that privilege. I used Command-A to select all in the new album, and then I right-clicked on one and chose Move to Shared Library.
[26:45]I also wanted to make sure that all of the iPhone photos for the same day were in this new album. I created one single Smart Album and I entitled it to just the day number of the date. So if the photos were for August 22nd, the Smart Album was entitled 22. Could have named it anything, but that was easier. I then set the date criteria to date captured is 8-22-2024 and the camera model is iPhone 15 Pro. So that gives me every photo that was taken on August 22nd. I then did a select all in this smart album using Command-A and drag them into the album for the 22nd of August. It was very important that I did this while I was in Africa because there's a nine-hour time difference to California, and if I did it at home, the smart album would grab the wrong date in some cases. And once I had the 22nd done, I changed the smart album name to 23, changed the date capture date 23, and then being rigorous doing it on the trip, that reduced the chances I'd lose track of of which images we're taking during which events on our trip. I'm sure I missed some, but I think it worked pretty well. And you'll notice one flaw in this. All of the photos that Steve and I took on our iPhone is all of the photos Steve and I took on our iPhone. They did not go through that rigorous process that I did with my giant photos from my big girl camera.
[28:04]We're still deleting things that are silly. I mean, the pictures I take of my foot accidentally are mostly gone, but there's still 26 pictures of the same hyena. So anyway, we didn't do all of it, perfectly.
[28:17]Now, as I mentioned earlier, Steve carried his big boy camcorder on the trip, and it was the right decision. With his 20 to 1 optical zoom lens, he was able to get amazing video well beyond anything you could get with a phone's camera. He paid special attention to how long he was recording, making lots of smaller clips rather than 10 straight minutes of an elephant herd knocking over a tree. Every day when I was feverishly going through my photos and writing up a witty commentary for my letter, Steve was reviewing his video clips, editing them down to just the best scenes, downsizing them to 480p so they'd squeak through the tiny internet pipes we had, and posting them to Facebook and Instagram. There were so many that I wished I could put in my letter, but it just wouldn't have worked. Now that we're home, Steve is going to take higher resolution versions of those same video clips, and he's going to put them on YouTube into a collection so we can share those with you if you guys are interested in seeing all of the crazy animals. Well, the animals aren't crazy. It was crazy that we saw them.
[29:19]Speaking of crazy, one of the coolest things we saw was a pack of endangered African painted dogs. The 19 adults went off to hunt while the 14 puppies were left on their own. They were adorable. We watched them with delight for a while, and then the adults came back from the hunt. It turns out that these dogs have two stomachs. After a kill, they gobble up the food, the adults, and it goes in big, unchewed chunks into the first stomach. Then they go back to the puppies, regurgitate the food, everyone scrambles to eat it, and it goes into the second stomach for digestion. I know that's a bit graphic, but it's a really efficient way to transport food to the puppies. Anyway, so the adults had all run off. They came back, and they barfed up the food, and the puppies went bananas. You could barely tell the swirling pack of colorful puppies from one another. I tried to take pictures, and I can't tell which puppy ends where. It's crazy because they're just, it was a swirling dervish thing. Anyway, the whole time they were doing this, they were yipping in this high-pitched sound that sounded like it was sped up. Now, I wished I could get that into my letter, but as I mentioned, bandwidth was a problem. But then we had an idea. Steve extracted just the audio, and that was small enough to include in my letter. Bet you want to listen to it, don't you? Well, of course, I'm going to let you hear it.
[30:46]Okay, seriously, isn't that crazy? Doesn't it sound like just sped up sound? I actually thought it was sped up when Steve gave me the audio clip. It's a lot of work to put these, this travelogue letter together. And a few years ago, Wally Czerwinski actually said to me, he said, you know, you should put that into one document so that you have it forever. And so I decided to start doing that. Each time I wrote a letter while I was on the trip, I copied the title as a new chapter and I pasted the letter in with all of the images. I made a big mistake though. I put that document on my desktop. Think about it, each day I was adding a lot of data to the file and most of the way through the trip I realized that file was over 300 megabytes. So here I am trying very carefully to sip internet everywhere and I'm sinking a 300 hundred megabyte folder because it was sitting on my desktop and it was going to iCloud. And every time I added to that document with a new day's adventure, iCloud was syncing the entire thing again. It might have been doing incrementals, but I'm not sure it was that smart. If I left it there, it was gonna clog what little internet pipes we had, so I moved it to the top level of my user account, which is one of the very few places on my Mac that isn't syncing.
[32:01]Now, I should have probably mentioned this earlier, but one of the most useful pieces of tech Steve brought with him was his Fujifilm Technostaby image-stabilized binoculars. You may remember Steve reviewing them two years ago when he first got them. While other folks had very good binoculars, when he let them look through his, they were amazed at how much better they could view the animals. With the 12x magnification, the image stabilization made a huge difference. We had so many safaris and they were so long that we often had extended periods of time to just watch the animals instead of trying to capture the images. So looking through these binoculars was a real treat. Now there's a new version out that's a whole kit worth of stuff, and the binoculars are now waterproof. They're $750 on Amazon, including a 64 gigabyte SD card, a soft backpack, an LED flashlight, and a cleaning kit, which we could have used in all the dust we ran into. And there's even a wrist strap for using it in the water. I don't know that I do that, but anyway. If you do look into getting one of these sets of binoculars, bring spare batteries on the trip, because you need batteries for the image stabilization.
[33:08]Including an SD card, the kit implies these binoculars capture digital images, but they don't. It's just an extra that they throw in. It's funny, these binoculars are so good that it's actually kind of frustrating because you're like, oh, I want to capture this. I want to take a picture. And you can't. And every time we use them, we keep thinking that like, oh, if this could only capture that image. Anyway, our buddy Ron bought the same binoculars on the trip on Steve's recommendation. And every day when he used them, he thanked Steve again for the recommendation. I know $750 is a lot, but they're worth it. They're just amazing.
[33:47]All right, let's change gears a little bit. When on a trip to distant lands, one of the tricky bits is that the countries you visit may not use the same plug-slash-outlet configuration as your home country. I'm lucky that I have a pocket electrical engineer in the house, but it's still not a guarantee of success. We've used a lot of different solutions to solve this problem over the years. I still laugh remembering we were going to travel to England, Ireland, and Belgium to visit Don McAllister, Bart, and Nightwise. I called Bart on Skype to show him the adapter we'd bought, and I asked him, is this the right plug for the UK? And he confirmed that it was. When we got to our accommodations near his house in Ireland, the plug didn't match the outlets. I'm sure you can see the flaw in my question. I was so uneducated about his part of the world that I thought Ireland was part of the UK. A real facepalm in that one for sure. For this trip, we bought two universal travel adapters, one for each of us, from a company called Vintar. I'm sure a lot of companies make this, but this adapter allows you to slide on different plug configurations, and then on the front it has one US grounded outlet, two USB-C, and one USB-A connection. On the top it has another US ungrounded outlet. That combination gave us lots of flexibility. And that Vintar adapter is $36 on Amazon, and of course there's a link in the show notes.
[35:06]This trip was one of the most sedentary trips, combined with lots of food that we've ever taken. They'd wake us up at 5.30 a.m., and at 6 a.m. they'd escort us in the dark from our cabins. You see, at that hour, the elephants and warthogs and other beasts are still up and about, so it's not safe to walk by yourself. We'd have first breakfast at 6 a.m., and then we'd walk a few steps to the jeep. We'd go on a three-hour safari and come back for second breakfast. We'd have a little rest up, then have lunch, and then it would be too hot to do anything, think so we'd have a siesta. This is when I would write my travelogue and Steve would work on his videos. After nap time, it was time for high tea. I think we should institute high tea in the U.S. because it's a lovely excuse to eat again. We then waddled to the jeeps for another safari. At sundown, they'd pull the jeeps onto a good position to watch the sunset with not as many wild animals around. I mean, one time there were a lot of wild African buffaloes, but it was fine. Anyway, they'd get us out of the Jeeps and pour us gin and tonics and give us snacks because we hadn't been fed in forever.
[36:10]After that, we'd drive back maybe a half hour to our lodging where we'd have dinner. Five meals a day was just right, including those snacks. In that entire time, we probably walked, I don't know, 2,000 steps a day if I'm rounding up. But if you chose to sit in the back of the Jeep, it was really bouncy. And I thought it was fun back there and the visibility was great. But the best part was how our Apple Watches counted our steps. Ron got the highest count on his watch, 20,936 steps. Again, seriously, 2,000 steps maximum.
[36:44]So, have you heard that muscle weighs more than fat? I can prove it. I lost 2.4 pounds on this trip. I am so out of shape. Back to tech. None of the people we traveled with had bought eSIMs, so they would immediately ask for the Wi-Fi password of every hotel and restaurant upon arrival. I was really pleased to see that every single one of them was a complex password. They all had upper and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols in them. I know that didn't make it secure for me, but I was pleased they all knew enough to make it secure from folks using it without being a customer. The one exception was really funny. We went to a restaurant called The Duck. I asked the waitress for the password, and she simply turned around. On the back of her shirt, it said, quack quack. Isn't that awesome? him. That made me laugh. Let's see, when we went hiking up in the High Sierras this year with our friends Bill and Diane, we were out in the wilderness enough that, far enough out, that we didn't have internet. However, we were able to use the Apple SOS feature on our phones to drop pins as we hiked along. Our other friends are nerdy enough that we knew if we didn't report back in after a few days, they'd look at Find Friends to see our locations. But in Africa, Ron tried to you do SOS, but alas, it hasn't come to Africa yet.
[37:59]I mentioned how bouncy the vehicles were on this trip, but the guide did his best to go slow most of the time, minimizing, you know, knocking fillings out of our teeth. On our last day, we had just fjorded a river. The vehicles have snorkels for air intake so they can do that. When our driver got a message on the radio that a pair of leopards was fighting over a kill, he told us, hold on, and he took off much faster than we'd ever gone before. I'm not exaggerating when I say that we caught air a few times as we bounced over the terrain. rain. After about 15 minutes, they found the leopards and we had quite a show. After we watched for a while, we started to drive away. The spotter started looking around the cab for something he dropped, and someone said that it was his iPhone he was looking for. Steve said, speaking of phones, and realized he couldn't find his. We had them stop and we began to search the vehicle. I tried using my Apple Watch to see if I could ping my phone, and it worked. I don't know, I'm wondering, like, was some sort of internet required? I wanted to double check it. So I had Steve try it on his watch, but sadly, his phone did not answer. That confirmed there was no reason to keep looking in the vehicle. We also tried to find my, but of course it didn't work because not only did we not have cellular service in this area, there were no other iPhones hovering around where the phone fell out to tell us its location. Now, remember how clever I was to back up my iPhone photos when we had no internet?
[39:23]Steve hadn't done that step, which meant he was going to be losing some of his photos that hadn't synced to iCloud. Now, the spotter and tracker on this trip were very skilled. They'd seen a lion trapped on top of a termite mound by a herd of African buffalo like three quarters of a mile away. They tracked the painted dog prints to the den where the pups were holed up. Earlier, they'd even found the tracker's own glasses he'd lost on a previous trip. So they started painstakingly crawling our way back to where we'd first driven so quickly in hopes of finding Steve's phone along the way. Steve was bummed about losing the phone, and I was really bummed it was right before a new model was coming out because I was like, I'm not buying you a new phone right before that. I'm not like he would buy it, but you know what I mean. And Steve was not hopeful they'd be able to find it. He was also bummed about losing the photos, and he was bummed about wrecking the last day of the safari for everyone else because for all this time, we weren't going and finding new animals. But after 45 minutes of crawling along, the tracker found Steve's phone. The bottom line here is that like every big trip, we learned more tips and tricks about how to use technology to capture our experiences. This might have been the coolest adventure we've ever been on, and we made the tech work for us.
[40:43]
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[40:43]Well, Ed Tobias, Kurt Liebeszeit, and George from Tulsa, along with Alistair Barton-Gill, did the best thing anyone can do to help the podcast. Providing original content helps give me a little bit of a break, or a long break as that case may be, but more importantly, it brings fresh voices to the show. If you'd like to contribute audio content and written posts too, if possible, we'd all love to hear from you. But you know what? If that sounds too hard, hard and listen to Jill. It is hard. Consider making a financial donation to help keep the servers running in the audio equipment in tip-top shape by going to podfeet.com slash Patreon to show you support.
[41:22]
CCATP #799 – Adam Engst on Apple’s Screen Recording Permissions in Sequoia Beta
[41:30]Well, it's that time of the week again, it's time for chit chat across the pond. And I'm joined yet again by Adam Angst of tidbits. How are you doing today, Adam? I'm doing good, and my pond is right there. There you go. It's important to always keep that in focus. Keep your pond in focus, right? Well, I've been out of town for quite a number of weeks here in Africa, but Adam hasn't rested one bit. And one of the articles that really lit me up was when you were discussing a change that Apple has introduced in the Sequoia beta. And it's raised quite a kerfuffle, and you have many opinions, I believe, right?
[42:07]I always have opinions. But yes, yes, this one, I have opinions that I'm willing to share because I think Apple is entirely just wrong. Yeah. Sometimes there's room for debate. Not this one. Yeah. No, I don't think so. So, okay, let's start at the beginning. So, we start seeing betas of Sequoia. I'm actually running the beta 15.1 so I can technically play with the Apple intelligence features, although that would imply I have free time to play with all these features. So, but all of a sudden, I started getting a permission dialogue from CleanShot X, which is the app I use for screenshots. And it said, do you want to, it pops up, you know, I install Sequoia beta. It says, oh, do you wish to continue to allow permissions to record the screen? Like, okay, yeah, that's a reasonable question to ask after you've done something major. I'm not offended by this. So, I say yes. And I don't think about it for a little while but I must have restarted or done something because this is my my MacBook Air which I don't it's not my primary Mac so I'm using it every couple of days for something and and I get the dialogue again I think I already said yes why am I being asked again but then like like a good journalist, I tried to take a screenshot of it.
[43:34]You can see where this goes, right? Because when you try to take a screenshot of the screenshot app dialogue and you're already in a screenshot scenario, it wants to ask you again. So I got another dialogue and I couldn't click on any of them because the mouse is being captured by what you're doing in the screenshot. Right. So it took minutes before the whole thing timed out and let me click the dialogue. What's going on i'm all upset um and so i finally i started to figure out what was going on and then actually chance miller at nine to five mac did a good article that sort of said oh here's exactly what's going on like ah excellent he's figured it out and it turns out that apple has decided in its infinite uh loop wisdom um that uh um we should be re-prompted for at least screen recording permissions every week, or if you restart your Mac, or if you log in and log out and log back in.
[44:38]For every app that does screenshots. For every app that does screenshots or requests screen recording permissions. See, now this is one of those interesting ones where we, Hoi Ploy users, think of screen recording as screen recording, right? You know, like you're recording stuff on the screen. Like screen flow or something. Screen videos or screen flow, screen float, you know, anything. Even QuickTime Player, you're recording screen, whatever. Sure, no problem. However, from the developer perspective, you might want to use the APIs that do screen recording to understand what's on the screen so that you can act on it in different ways. So it turns out there's a whole bunch of apps that request these permissions because they're doing something else that requires this identifying on-screen elements or doing something that involves this context of the screen. So things like Photoshop, Premiere, Default Folder 10, DisplayLink, Google Chrome, Ice, Keyboard Maestro, Slack, Text Snipers, and Zoom. All of these kinds of things are going to ask for these permissions. So, yes. I pretty much have all of those installed. Precisely.
[46:05]And there's plenty more, too. That's just like a, hey, you're going to probably have a couple of these. Plus any screenshot apps you might use. Does the built-in screenshot app do it too? No, of course no Okay, I mean come on you give that that's assumed to have permission can't possibly fair is Yeah, right. So so the So so basically, yes You could be in a situation where you were getting a dialogue from each of these apps once a week or every time you restarted your Mac.
[46:40]Which, I mean, let me tell you, when I'm testing something, I will often restart my Mac, you know, multiple times a day because I want to, you know, a clean setup or something. And to have to, believe me, to have to deal with that dialogue every time I'm going to take a screenshot after restarting your Mac, really, really annoying. So do you have any idea what problem they were trying to solve?
[47:01]So the closest I can think, it's an interesting question. I mean, it's obviously security related, right? Right. That you have given permissions. It's an interesting problem because this is not going to solve some bad app is recording your screen. Right. Because we've already solved that with the it will be it will ask. So you can say no the first time you could say no the first time. This is saying that you've already said yes. Actually, no, we want you to keep saying yes. Adam, it's even more than that. You have to actively turn on the toggle to allow it to screen record. It's not even saying it's not a yes dialogue, right? You have to go into screen recording permissions and oh, yeah. Yeah precisely Oh, yeah. Yeah, no, it's a positive action Positive action. So this is this is a situation where Apple seemingly believes that You will have changed your mind.
[47:57]About allowing an app to do this in a week In a week, right or a restart, right? Like, I mean, holy cats, like just being ridiculous. I was okay before this restart, but now I'm not so sure. Yeah, you know, and so I shouldn't, I'm pushing a little too hard on the restart and the login and the week. Because in fact, after this blows up from my article and Jason Snell and Grant Gruber and a ton of people wrote about it, as well as 9to5Mac and whatnot, it hits everywhere. The next beta of Sequoia drops it to a month.
[48:38]And takes out the restart login thing. Okay. So it's not nearly as bad as I was talking to Glenn Fleischman about it. So it's four times better than it was and 12 times worse than it needs to be. For you. So it's like, I'm not going to hit you in the face with this hammer every day or every week. I'm only going to do it once a month. But I'm going to do it for every single application you have that might ever think it needs to know something about the screen. Yes.
[49:12]So, OK, so it's gotten better. Right. It has gotten better in the sense of like it's only once a month. It's run less often. It's run less often. Right. And it gets better than that. Even Apple also changed the prompt text. So it now says app name, for instance, is requesting to bypass the system private window picker and directly access your screen and audio. This will allow app name to record your screen and system audio, including personal or sensitive information that may be visible or audible. Wait, what is system private window picker?
[49:53]By words precisely. And again, we do this kind of stuff. We're good at this. We know this stuff. I don't know. Honestly, we are. We're good at this. So someone someone finally did explain to me in Tibbett's talk that where Apple was going with this and the reason for that language, which is still horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible, is, you know, how in Zoom, when you click share screen, you get to pick which window you're sharing. Or entire screen. Yeah. Right. So apparently, um.
[50:33]Apple provides an API to give you that window picker. Okay. And if Zoom or WebEx or whatever has their own interface, that's what bypassing the system private window picker means. Now, what this means for screenshot utilities, default folder 10, Photoshop, Premiere, Bartender, who knows? Like, it just makes no sense whatsoever. I'm pretty sure my brother-in-law would understand this immediately. I mean, I wouldn't have to explain it to him. Jeez. So, you know what this reminds me a little bit of? Whenever I get an update to the Tesla, they talk about how many lines of C code they've changed. It's like, even I don't care about that, you know? It is all nerd talk in the thing. It's not like this is going to make you hit fewer trash cans, which would be good information to have. Right. But. Oh, my gosh. We took out the grand theft auto mode, you know, like, OK. Yeah. I mean, especially I mean, I slight sidetrack, but you're aware of the obfuscated C contests. No. So they must still go on. I don't know. Basically, the goal is to write an app that does something in the fewest lines slash characters possible. Okay.
[52:02]So talking about number of lines of code is kind of irrelevant because you could write tighter code, too. I mean, come on now. Sure. I mean, why are you wasting all that space? And you're probably putting comments in there, aren't you? Yeah, you don't want to do that. You don't want to have long variable names that explain what they are. So any of that's right. Lines of code, not important. Okay, so this system private window picker, with the change going to once a month, four times less stupid, does it still say system private window picker? As far as I've heard, yes. Unfortunately, I've only gotten one. They haven't updated 15.1 as many times as they've updated 15.0. So I haven't been able to see those versions quite as well. But my understanding is it hasn't changed from that at this point. It's not clear if this is actually going to ship just because something is in the beta and that language is so horrible it almost doesn't sound like it's planning to ship even Apple really doesn't do that kind of stuff, at the very least if they thought they were talking to developers.
[53:13]Maybe if you squint turn your head sideways you could see why they would pick that language but that doesn't mean they won't change the language and keep it 12 times stupider than it needs to be. Entirely possible. 12 times stupider than it needs to be per year. Yes, on an annual basis. On an annual basis, right. Over the life of the Mac. Wait, like you have this annual percentage rate? This would be the what? The annual annoyance rate? Right, right, right. Now, what's the effect on the general user or the Adam Angst of the world of having a pop-up like this that's so constant? What is your human reaction to that?
[53:49]Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay. So there's, there's a guy named Jeff Atwood, who he did Stack Overflow. He's he's a major, major high heaven develop a developer, he does discourse now on those chats, forum software. Long ago when this stuff first kind of started to hit in Windows Vista, I remember that. Yeah, Windows Vista. He had a post decrying this kind of problem and he said basically, all of these dialogues mashed together into a giant click here to get your work done button.
[54:30]Because that's really what it comes down to. It is the boy who cried wolf writ large in your Macintosh. Because you don't know, you don't care, you just want this thing out of your face. Yeah, yeah. It doesn't make you think, it makes you annoyed. point. Has anybody written a keyboard maestro macro yet to click that dialogue as soon as it comes up? Not that I know of, but it should be possible. It's doable, right? Oh, but wait a minute, would it have to have screen recording permissions to do so? Yes, it would. Yeah, you'll probably get into that double the double triple dialogue but they just keep padding up do they all come at the same time like if i've got uh keyboard maestro and i've got ice and i've got bartender all these things i've got screen float do they all come on at once so you can go click click click no you have to actually do something that triggers it okay so like clean shot doesn't clean shot x doesn't doesn't trigger it until you do a screenshot okay i am actively asking for a screenshot do you want Why don't you allow the system window picker?
[55:44]I would lose my ever-loving mind. Talk about downgrading OSs. That would make me do it. So back to what Apple was thinking. This is what I still don't get. Even on a monthly basis, you have installed an app. You have given the positive permission in privacy and security, screen recording permissions, permissions that yes, I want to give this permission. You have used this app, presumably. Now, I, my proposal, if Apple thinks this is like an actual concern, is that a random number of days afterwards, somewhere in the two to five, after installation, once after installation, okay, you present this once. Because let's say you're, you're, you're trying something and someone says, hey, check out this cool new app that lets you make funny faces and show them to all your friends.
[56:42]And you install this and you use it once and you think, well, that's stupid. And then you get sidetracked and you forget that this thing has full screen recording permissions and is actually going to be showing your stupid faces to your friends all the time until you shut it off. So I can understand one more prompt to say, hey, you know, are you still using this? Are you aware this is still going? That's acceptable. You know, you really do get into that situation where you might have tried something once and then forgot. But something like Zoom or, you know, Photoshop or Keyboard Maestro, which you have installed and you use regularly, it hasn't changed.
[57:24]For example, in that month. Why would you possibly want to ask, like, what could have changed for the user in that month, that they would now want to rescind the permissions, which in all likelihood are going to make the app not work? Right, right, right. Right, right. It's not like, it really isn't the, oh, I don't trust it to do that, but I'll use it to do everything else. Yeah. Very few apps fall into that category. There are a few. I mean, don't get me wrong, there's a few. Yeah, right. I really didn't want to do screen recording for my screenshots because, well, I don't know, I'll paint them or something instead. Does it do it for audio recording too?
[58:03]I believe so. Because it says record your screen and system audio. So something like Audio Hijack would trigger it. Could easily. I don't know that one for sure, but yes. QuickTime. Oh no, sorry, QuickTime is probably blessed. Undoubtedly. like um it's it's basically a particular permission it's literally the screen recording permissions and so um which i suspect is kind of a bundle of various related things.
[58:35]Now there craig hockenberry um well-known developer um said hey there's actually this entitlement this sort of sounds related um and um it's it's called the persistent content capture entitlement and so so, There is some thought that, hey, maybe this would work. But Apple only describes that as, quote, a Boolean value that indicates whether a virtual network computing, VNC app, needs persistent access to screen capture. So that does sort of sound like, you know, you're sharing screens in some way, and, you know, you want to be able to not have to prompt on this regularly. But again, that's much more in the Zoom, WebEx, Skype, whatever world, not the screenshot world, not the Photoshop, the default Folder 10 utilities that are just looking at the screen and trying to do something. And Apple has said absolutely nothing about whether or not that entitlement would be appropriate, would be granted, is available to be requested, et cetera, et cetera. So that's the only out we have right now. That people think might be allowed to do. Yeah, the only hope we have for an out right now. In a general sense, I feel like Apple has been getting progressively more naggy on doing permissions.
[1:00:03]Massively so. Massively so. So not just by imagination. No, no, no. It's not even close. I mean, it's just constant.
[1:00:14]And I actually, I mean, the problem is that this is, I don't think, I think this is bad security. I mean, I they're doing it for security reasons, obviously, oh, yes, you might, you should know that this is going to happen, to an extent that's useful. But a whole lot of it is just again, mash the giant, get some work done. But you know, we're like, I want to use this app, of course, it's going to do x, y, and z, because that's what its function is. And it's only interesting when you install, I don't know, you know, a utility that's supposed to, I don't know, you know, like, well, you know, Keyword Maestro is a little bit funny that way, because you don't, many people don't realize all the things it can do. You think, oh, it's just this little hotkey utility. But no, it can do so much more that it does need these screen recording permissions. Well, and there's apps where one of my favorites was when I installed Ice to look at it as an alternative for bartender where I've got a screenshot in front of me of the permissions thing and it says screen recording. ICE needs your permission to apply custom styling to the menu bar. ICE does not record your screen. Grant permission to screen recording. Yeah.
[1:01:26]Yeah, precisely because again, from the developer standpoint, it's a very useful thing to be able to do. Do you understand what it is that it that it is doing that isn't screen recording, but Apple interprets as screen recording? It is using the screen recording APIs to identify on-screen controls.
[1:01:52]So like your keyboard maestro has to know where to click. It has to have a view of the screen. Sure. I understand with Keyboard Maestro, but in the case of ICE or Bartender, is it because it needs to know that it's put the icons in the right place that you told it to put them? Probably, yes. Okay. I don't use either of those offhand.
[1:02:13]But, yeah, it's one of those things where developers actually come up with the cleverest ways of doing things, right? I mean, Apple presumably did not intend that API to be used for that purpose. Right, which means they should provide another API, and then they wouldn't be in that category. Right, you know, but like, oh, if you need to do this funny thing, and keep in mind, that's the sort of stuff that is, you know, much more likely on the Mac, vastly more likely on the Mac than the iPhone. You don't get to, like, look at the screen of the iPhone using your app and do something. Even if you want to. Even if you want to. It just ain't happening. in it so uh so yeah so so but this this general like some some level of awareness of informing the user of something is good and some level of permission is good you know like you know because like if you just inform them that oh ice has permission to do this you know or ice is ice is ice can do this that's good but you could argue that it you know that if you if you're just trying Buying ICE, you have no real idea what it does, and it asked for these kind of extreme permissions, including some things which you don't think are related at all. You know, like, oh, ICE is asking for full access to your contacts and your photos. I was just going to use that example. That's the one I wanted to come back and say, do you really want it to have access to your contacts? No, I really don't. It doesn't need that. So many apps ask for that.
[1:03:42]Yeah, and so in those cases, it's useful. But this one feels like they've got this, you know, they're, they're seeing it purely as, oh, video conferencing apps where you're sharing the screen, you know, you want to make sure they're not doing something bad. And, and people are, but again, you're not really helping. It keeps running into that it's not really helping prevent doing something bad, because if it's doing the right thing to zoom could be sending our video off to off to China, for all we know.
[1:04:16]And we've given it permission because we're giving it permission to do what we expect it to do. Right, right, right. So it doesn't stop them from doing it. All it does is create a situation where every month you, in theory, have to go, oh, do I still want my screenshot utility to work?
[1:04:36]You know, because it's not going to stop the malware. I mean, the reason why I had that, you know, like random two to five days afterwards idea is imagine because you could imagine a bad app, a malware app. You know, so you have like a you're in a domestic abuse situation where the evil partner installs this video monitoring software on the Mac. And accepts the permissions and does the positive thing. And the other, the abusee, is then being monitored and recorded. And so if you, without their knowledge in any way, shape, or form. And so if you then prompt again, two to five days later, you've got a chance of getting it by the abuser. They wouldn't be able to answer it positively again. Yeah. You know, there's actually something for that already, though, is I've turned on Zoom so that we can see each other. And I see a little icon that shows that my my video is being recorded. If my if my audio is being recorded, I see the audio thing come up. If yes, actually does screen recording. Yeah. And screen recording does. Yes. Yep. It does. Yeah. No, you get you get you get all that sort of stuff.
[1:05:58]That's the best I can come up with. Yeah, it's the best I can come up with. No, I mean, right. That's the whole, like, so, like, I'm looking, I have an iMac, so I'm looking at the little green recording light of the camera. And I have the little green light next to control center. So, I mean, that. I have a little video camera icon.
[1:06:18]The video camera icon, too. That's a third thing. If it was audio, there would be orange next to control center. It would be an orange microphone icon. If it was just doing screen recording, it would be a purple icon. I don't know if there'd be something next to control center. If I click on control center, I see the orange audio recording icon. But without clicking control center, I don't see the orange icon. But I do see the green one for video. I think screen recording subsumes audio. Well, it's not screen recording. It's video recording. Video recording, sorry. Sorry, video recordings assumes audio. So video assumes audio, orange is audio only, and then purple is screen recording. You know what I'd like to see? An enhancement to your idea. So I like the idea of three to five days later. But I wanted to do that for apps that I haven't actually launched. And I wanted to have a second button that says, do you want to just delete the app too while we're here? Because that's not a bad idea at all. I'm the person who is gonna download that thing that sends funny pictures to my friends and a week later I'm gonna forgotten that I did that because it was stupid Well, no, I'd probably love it. But if it was and then I'd like to be able to just go yeah Hey, why did I give that permission? So something I haven't launched lately because maybe it'll set the auto launch or something like that I don't know. Yeah. Yeah, I could I mean maybe not maybe not a nag warning but maybe a you know, like I.
[1:07:44]An option where you could just you know you get you know where basically like in system information or something like that where you could where you can show you all your apps and it could just it could just say you haven't used these apps you know apps you haven't used in six months delete delete delete delete delete like oh okay i would use that in a minute oh yeah yeah i mean that's the main reason i do a clean install is because i'm too lazy to go through and look at and figure out when i haven't launched anything was and the iphone needs that even more so yeah it does, you know though i meet people who've never installed anything on their phones.
[1:08:22]Really really nothing yeah or like hardly anything you know maybe they put snapchat on once five years ago and they haven't installed anything else i mean i i like i said well you know you're gonna lose all your apps i don't have any apps what are you talking about then again steve's dad always tells me he hasn't installed any apps and then I bring up his app folder and I said okay it comes with what is it is it 60 or 80 apps come pre-installed and I said but here's all you have 120 you have installed apps no I didn't I never installed those yeah right so well then we should talk now the only way to solve this is uh apple.com feedback or through the developer channel probably.
[1:09:03]So I'm suggesting people, if you have the beta, use the feedback assistant, file a bug against it. And if you're not using the beta, then the feedback page is the closest I can get. But there's nothing specific to that kind of scenario. So what I'm recommending is use it for the Mac you plan to upgrade to Sequoia. You know, feedback on that. That. And there was a little bit of a, oh, Apple compromised by switching it to monthly. I'm like, no, it's still bad, right? This was unnecessary. You don't get compromising from an unnecessary point of view to a less unnecessary point of view. It wasn't necessary to begin with. And so, you know, so... It's just like, core events have to prevail here. They have to. That's my hope. I mean, Apple does this sort of thing all the time where they put something into an operating system and it never really ships. You know, it was something they're working on. It's not ready. They actually need to, you know, add an API or an entitlement or something like that before it will be ready. So that's my hope.
[1:10:18]But you know we will see I mean when Sequoia you know 15.0 ships we will this will be like the first thing to test you know you try your screenshot you set your clock forward a month a month and you try it again and that's as simple as that but yeah, developers I mean part of it is also developers are up in arms about this because they're in a situation where all of a sudden then people are going to be viewing their apps more suspiciously. Right. And it's going to cause support burden for them. Sure, sure. For no reason, right? You know, it makes me think if I was the developer of CleanShot X, I would put something out just saying, no, this is not ready for Sequoia.
[1:11:05]I'm not going to allow it to run under Sequoia until we confirm that this is fixed, right? Because that's better than having people think it's a bad app. That's terrible. Yeah, yeah. Because it can really hurt your reputation very quickly. You know, this kind of gets out within a community. You would think Adobe might have a little bit of weight in this fight. They might know somebody. You do feel like there's some back channels that should be should be implemented at this point um you know so um you know i i'm talking to people i know at apple but i haven't gotten anything anything back yet from you know people in the know so why is photoshop one of the ones what do they do that i don't know really oh wow hey yeah i mean it's just it's like people the people have reported that one so i'm not sure exactly again it's it's it's subtle a lot of the time right right so it may just be oh this was the best way for us to draw our palettes in a certain way.
[1:12:08]Like if it floats outside of the wind like you float a pallet outside or something right.
[1:12:14]It could be something as as silly as that and and where it was never a problem so there was no reason not to do it um and and that or it's possible that photoshop oh actually someone said that color pickers all need it and so that might be it because they don't use the standard photo they don't use the apple standard photo picker then right that's right so in photoshop if you use photoshop i don't um can you pick a color from outside the app i know other apps can do that like uh affinity photo you can you can take your but it's the apple standard photo picker that you take the eyedropper and you bring it out and you grab something from your desktop background and bring it back in um that'd be even worse if it's using that right so photoshop is using their own their own color picker maybe and they need to be able to record the screen to see what color of the pixel is under your click right okay i just looked it up why does photoshop meet screen recording permissions and adam angst is right shockingly this permission is only required if you want to use the eyedropper tool in photoshop to sample colors from other apps if you do not grant permission then you will be limited to sampling colors from within the photoshop app but i wonder if that's the uh if that's the apple color picker that'd be really weird if it was their uh well it no it probably is there it's probably a custom color picker because, again, they'll probably want a cross-platform solution.
[1:13:43]Okay. I'm going to ask why does Affinity... I don't know that Affinity Photo needs it, but let me see what it says. Permission to record screen window. Yep, it asks the same thing. Huh.
[1:14:01]So that makes me think, because I don't think they use a non-standard color picker. I'm pretty sure Affinity does. It may be one of those things where it's non-standard somewhere below the hood. You know, like, you know, they're calling, they're using the UI, but not actually some aspect of the actual grabbing. Or just being allowed to use the system level one requires screen recording permissions. That might be. That's possible too. Could be. Could be. I hate this. There might be colors involved. They might discover some colors. Your colors could leak out into public. And those are my colors.
[1:14:43]Well, one can only hope that this is, like I said, cooler heads have to prevail. This one is just so stupid. I can't imagine that one sticking around. Yeah. And this does feel to me like, you know, one of those very good uses of, like, you know, internet internet internet irate the internet becoming irate you know because if no one says anything then Apple is like well clearly this is not a problem let's just put it in and and to be fair there are certain cases where like a regular prompt is not a terrible idea so you know there's the rules behind on the iPhone you know when you're prompted for your passcode even if you've got face ID your touch ID. You have to put in your passcode once every, it's basically six and a half days, I think. It's a very funny number. Oh, really? Okay. Yeah, basically.
[1:15:38]And there's all sorts of other, after you restart, after you do that, blah, blah, blah, blah. And the reason why Apple does that, has that timer, is that they really want you to remember your passcode. If you forget your passcode, bad stuff happens. And so that is this case where it makes sense to do that random little nag of, oh yeah, I'm going to make you type in your password. Same thing of the password on the Mac. You know, if you've got touch ID or your Apple watch or something every now and then it's going to ask you for your password because you really can't forget it. I mean, if you go more than, more than a few days without ever thinking about it, some people will forget it and that's going to cause them headaches later on. So that's an example of like, oh yes, that was a good idea to reaffirm yeah reaffirm something and nag us into it it does make me use a little less complex password than i would though.
[1:16:33]Because I do have to do it often enough. I know I should go a little worse or harder than I do. I do make it a little bit harder, but I don't make it a lot harder. Because you type it a lot. No, it's absolutely the case. I was also, the other day, I was pleased when I realized that it doesn't matter how many times you mess up your 1Password, it just keeps letting you try. And that's such a relief. Because that one's 168 characters long and it's got a goat in the middle of it. I mean, it's it's hard password. So I don't always get it right. If I if I haven't logged in in a couple of days, I'm like, you know, got to get the muscle memory working again. And so especially on the phone. And so the fact that it doesn't lock you out permanently or for the next 378 years, like if my granddaughter messes with my iPhone. phone?
[1:17:22]Oh, new iPhone. I guess so. I guess so. All right. This has been good learning all about this. I'm enraged. You know, I've gotten bored with political enragement, so it's kind of fun to focus on something else. We have those enraged muscles really flexed right now, so we're good at it. But it's fun to direct it somewhere else. Oh, I did want to tell you one last thing. It has nothing to do with any of this, but I saw a t-shirt that really made me laugh today. It was black and on the front it said, think. So of course I looked at what was on the back, expecting to see differently. On the back, it was the IBM logo.
[1:18:04]Isn't that funny? That's gotta be a dig, right? Don't just think differently, think. I actually, I have to, I want to say that there actually is an IBM phrase about... Think IBM? Like from the 80s. I think it's old. Maybe think was before think differently. I think so. I think it's possible to think differently. We could ask the internet. I have to be careful here. As I, I have, I have, I'm very pleased with myself because I've set up a new, um, yes. Um, yeah, the think slogan stylized by stylized uppercase was introduced by Thomas Watson in 1911.
[1:18:57]Okay. Well, it's more interesting than I thought then. Um, so actually this is the first time you've, I've had that thought, which is that now think I think different is now even, it's actually much more of a dig than anything else. I did not put that together. Yeah. So I grew up near IBM Owego and IBM Endicott, two big IBM plants at the time. Neither exists anymore. They've been taken over. One, I think, I'm not sure about one, but one is by Lockheed Martin. But so all my high school friends, a lot of their parents worked at IBM. And back in the day the phrase, at least among my friends whose parents worked there was that people who worked at IBM were zipper heads, because you would go into work and you would I forget what you'd say, you would unzip and you would just do your work and you'd zip up and you'd go home. I don't know quite where that came from.
[1:19:55]If you look in Wikipedia, think different. The slogan has been widely used as a response to the IBM slogan, think. Wow. We're just figuring this out now? Yeah, what are the chances that I saw that shirt and that I would mention it to you? Because it wouldn't have occurred to me to look at it. Also, when I brought it up, did I say I expected it to say differently? Differently. Yeah, yeah. Sorry. I caught that. But you appreciated the grammatically correct version, right? I did. I did. I did. The reason why I was going to have trouble searching is I've now got, I made myself a keyboard maestro macro because I use Arc. And Arc has command option N, which is a system-wide... Ooh, system-wide. I hope it has permissions for that. A system-wide keyboard shortcut to do a search that then feeds into Arc. And so the problem is it's a system-wide search and then you have to type. Well, I was like, oh, what if I turn... And then recently I've been and like turning on dictation so I can just talk to it. And I'm like, ooh, if I do a keyboard maestro macro that brings that up, waits half a second, turns on dictation, I can just dictate all my searches. Ooh. Sort of like you could with Siri, you mean?
[1:21:10]Oh, but it actually works. Oh, I see. I see. And, oh, and I'm dictating, I'm searching in perplexity. Where? Oh, that's the AI you like, right? Yeah, yeah. So I'm not doing, so I actually do want to do, you know, you know, tell me about the relationship between the IBM Think logo and Apple's Think Different campaign. So you can be effusive and get the full answer, right? Right, precisely. And so, because I'm not trying to just do a keyword search in Google, basically. And and that's much easier perplexity likes that and it's much easier to do with with dictation um so uh so yeah so that's my i'm currently i but but it doesn't but i can't do it on a podcast because i like i'd hit my thing and then i'd have to talk to it i have no idea what would happen when dictation would kick in and somewhere else like bad things would happen and you should not have permission to do that adam and on that note and on that note you can find everything adam Adam writes at tidbits.com. And you know what? You talk a lot about tidbits talk. You mentioned that often. Describe what tidbits talk is so people can understand how to get involved.
[1:22:17]Yeah. So tidbits talk, it is discourse. It's a web-based discussion forum. And we have it tied into tidbits. So whenever you leave a comment on a tidbits article, it's actually in discourse, which is another website called talk.tidbits.com. And so we have only three categories of discussions. There's article comments, which are comments on the articles. There's a very, very, very low one called site feedback, where people complain if something isn't working. And then there's the really big one, which is just tidbits talk. And that is any kind of Apple-related discussions people want to have, although I usually draw the line at whining.
[1:23:01]Just tighter to the whining. Even if this whole article was whining. This article wasn't was was not whining it was constructive criticism it was um because because in fact i i'm making no but it's but it's serious like that's just it i actually really do i really don't mind people criticizing apple at all right but i dislike just the when if i ever hear the phrase when if steve jobs were still alive one more time you know yeah so you know it's just like it's just yeah right it's it has it has no real relevance and and and it's just the oh you You know, Apple's quality has dropped so much over the last 10 years. Like, oh, what are you basing? You're not. You're just whining. Stop it. Yeah. If you have a specific criticism, that's something. Or an idea of how it could be improved. Yeah. Right. And a suggestion for how to fix it. You know, those are totally legitimate things. And Apple should absolutely be held accountable for they do things they do badly.
[1:23:58]But you got to have a suggestion that's real world and not just the, well, if Steve Jobs were still alive, he wouldn't have allowed this. us. You know, I really like that you just have a couple of categories. I tease friends of mine who have, in general, like, for some reason, Discord seems to be where people like to have 14 categories. And I get there and I go, I don't know where to post this. I'll just go away. I have very few in, we use Slack for my community, and I have very, very few in there. But like, one of them is called Delete Me. That's where you can just put stuff that doesn't matter. Like, it's not even on topic, but it made you laugh. Maybe it's an XKCD cartoon or something, you know, whatever you want. And one is no Silla Castaways show off. So that's where like, Hey, look, I wrote this cool thing, or I took this awesome picture or, you know, something you're proud of a podcast you posted. It's a place for them to show off. And other than that, it's a, there's a security one, a programming one in general. That's it. And you can kind of tell the difference between those. I am not a big Reddit person at all. I mean, I occasionally stumble on something in Reddit through a Google search, or a Blexity search at this point. But it is clear that Reddit is sort of the exponential logical conclusion of breaking things down into as many categories as possible. Where you can find like the left-handed wingnut Reddit, subreddit.
[1:25:24]Precisely. With British threads. But don't be talking to me about the wrenches for those because that's a different subreddit.
[1:25:31]I love it. I love it. Well, on that note, people should go to tidbits.com and read these very intelligent and constructive articles by Adam Angst and all of the other lovely authors there at Tidbits, correct? Absolutely. And Tidbits Talk, very high quality discussions because there's no whining. I love it. All right. We'll talk to you again soon, Adam. All right. Thanks, Alison. it. Well, that is going to wind us up for this week. That was a long one. I hope you enjoyed the tech and travel thing. I know it took up most of the show, but I thought it was enough tech stuff. I thought it was pretty fun. Well, did you know you can email me at alison at podfeet.com anytime you like? If you have a question or a suggestion, just send it on over. You could send in those reviews if you'd like to. Remember, everything good starts with podfeet.com. You can follow me on Mastodon at podfeet.com slash Mastodon. If you want to listen to the podcast on YouTube, you can go to podfeet.com slash YouTube. I know that's what the kids these days do. If you want to join in the conversation, you can join our Slack community at podfeet.com slash Slack, where you can talk to me and all the other lovely Nocilla castaways. And remember, go to podfeet.com slash chat to join us for the Glow Time event tomorrow. You can support the show at podfeet.com slash Patreon, or with a one-time donation like Christoph did this week at podfeet.com slash PayPal. And if you want to join in the fun of the live show, head on over to podfeet.com slash live on Sunday nights at 5 p.m.
[1:26:58]Music.