Hello and welcome to Mac Power Users. My name is Stephen Hackett and I'm joined by my friend and yours, Mr. David Sparks. Hey, Stephen. How are you today? I'm good, David. How are you? I, you know, I had vacation this year. I was thinking about you because we were in the state of Hawaii, the lovely state of Hawaii. Did you know that like every other car in Hawaii is a Toyota Tacoma? Yeah, it's heaven on earth.
That's what it sounds like to me. The whole time, we were just counting them driving around. I'm like, Mr. Hackett would be so happy if he was here. He would be among family. That's right. Ohana, as they say. Yeah. Yeah, you got to get out there sometime. It's great. But back in the saddle here with the old Mac Power users. Today, before we get started, I was a guest on the Paper Places podcast.
Yeah. Yeah. This is a podcast on Relay hosted by Carrie Provenzano, our chief advertising officer. Carrie's also a writer and she has this great show talking about people, talking to people about the writing process and. Your interview was great. It was so good. It was really fun. You know, I didn't know what to expect, but Carrie is really good at it.
I talk about blending analog and digital tools in my writing system. And it was kind of a workflow that I'd never really discussed before. So go check it out. We'll put a link in the show notes. And today on More Power Users, which is the longer ad-free version of the show, we're going to be talking with our guest, Ken Case, about managing software products across...
technological transitions. So Ken has been, as we're going to talk about in a second, Ken has been in this game for a long time and has seen a lot of things come and go. And we just want to talk about how you approach those things and maybe some fun stories of transitions gone past. So members, look for that at the end of the show. And if you're not a member, there's a link in the show notes to join. You get a longer ad-free version.
of the show and a bunch of extra goodies. We'd love to have your support. Yeah. You know, a constant throughout the run of Mac power users has been the Omni group. I've always said that they're one of the premier software houses outside of Apple, making software for Apple ecosystem. And welcome to the show, Ken Case. I guess, is it your role CEO? I mean, I know you run...
the shop over there. I don't know what your actual title is, though. Yes, CEO. Well, thank you for inviting me. Yeah, and Ken, we've had you on the show with some of the software... developer roundtables in the past you've been on but uh in 800 episodes you've never been a guest on the show so
When you and I were talking recently about it, I was really excited to have you on because I think you've got a real interesting story that we'd like to share with the audience. So thanks for being here. Thank you. Looking forward to it. Ken, tell us about your education, how you got started in this racket. Sure. Well, let's see. How far back do I go? I first got exposed to computers, I guess, when I was...
not even a teenager yet, and my mom was taking some classes at the University of Washington. And one of the classes was about, she was working on... I think she was maybe working towards her master. No, she was probably working towards her doctorate at that point in education and education administration. And one of her...
classes was about using this cyber mainframe and going in and learning how to use punch cards and submit these cards and get bad output on printers. And I'd been fascinated by computers. for years before that, reading about them in encyclopedias and things. But I hadn't had the opportunity to use one in person until I kind of went along with her to her class and listened along as all these adults were learning how to use punch cards.
I kind of helped my mom, you know, do that stuff. It was a fun way to... to start to use a computer. But of course, at that time, every job that you did, every job that you submitted to this mainframe, you were being charged. They had some very precise accounting. So at the end of every printout, it would say, here's how much money you spent to accomplish this goal.
And it wasn't something then that I would have any access to after the end of that quarter. So my real start with computers, I guess, came with the Apple II when it showed up at my... What grade was I in at that time? I guess I was in sixth grade, or between sixth grade and seventh grade. The Apple II arrived, and I...
got a chance to take home all of the manuals for the summer because nobody else was that interested in them, read through it all, and then came back and tried to help other people as much as I could and so on. And, of course, what... they realized was that with one computer at an entire school, that meant each student maybe got half an hour every few weeks. It was not a big school, obviously, but still it was one computer to go around among a lot of students.
So my parents took pity on me, and we couldn't afford an Apple II, so we got an Atari 800, which turned out to be a great little machine. Wow, Ken, you're just pushing so many buttons with me, because I think you and I are about the same age. That was me, you know, that age where computers, the home computer was a new thing. I remember there was the Atari 400 that had the world's worst keyboard ever shipped.
If anybody's listening to this, I think I've mentioned this on the show in 800 episodes. I'm not sure I could ever avoid it, but I had a 400 at one point. And you had to have a pencil that you would just like press really hard on this capacity. It wasn't even capacitive. I don't know what it was. It was like a membrane mushiness. Yeah. And it's safe to spill water on though, right? Yeah, apparently. But it really wasn't.
because it would get in around the edges. Oh, yeah, that's true. But the Atari 800 was the superior Atari. And actually, you could put cartridges in it. That was the actual computer. But it was the one for all of us that couldn't afford the Apple. But, you know, having started at that phase, I'm sure it gives you a perspective on the industry.
Because you have been there for the whole run of the personal computer. I mean, you were there at the beginning. And just look where we are now. It's just so amazing. Yeah, well, it's incredible, I think, how much things... have moved over the decades, of course. I recently shared, I think on Mastodon, that my 1980s were sort of bookended by that Acharya 800 on the early end.
and the next computer on the late end. And so, you know, in between, I went to the University of Washington, and there I learned, I started using VAX computers.
I got to use some of that cyber some more, the one with the punch cards, but interactively. And then, of course, a bunch of Unix machines, lots of Unix machines. There were so many different... variations that were happening at that time as we had kind of an explosion of professional workstation vendors with Sun Computers and Digital was making some of their own and Apollo and Silicon Graphics and so on.
And I kind of got caught up in all of that as a systems manager and system administrator for the University of Washington and then became a systems programmer. And then I, as a systems programmer there, they got this lab donated by Next.
I'm not sure if it was donated or if Next actually managed to persuade them to pay for it, but whatever. It showed up at the computer lab there, and they didn't really know what to do with it. They started treating it a lot like they were treating their PCs, where... You would walk up to Annex and you would bring your own media that had all of your files on it. And you would sit down at it and you'd start doing your work. And then when you leave as a student, you would...
Make sure you saved everything back to your media and take it with you. Well, the media at that time on the PC was, you know, a floppy disk, which didn't hold very much, but wasn't that expensive either. The media on these next computers were these, we called them flopptical disks. They were magneto-optics.
optical sort of cartridges that could hold an awful lot of data at the time. And now I'm trying to think what that was. Was it maybe 100 megabytes or something? It seemed crazy, right? It seemed as big as many hard drives. Maybe it's 256 megabytes now that I think about it. And so people would bring these in and out if they could afford them, but that was pretty expensive for a student just to have one of these cartridges.
As a Unix system at that point, I'm like, well, that's not the right way for us to be treating these Unix machines. Let's go ahead and just NFS mount these, you know. the big drives from the server mainframes that we had behind the scenes and the next can all...
serve the files that way. You can log into it. You can log into it with your own username and password, and it'll have everything there for you and be good to go. So that was kind of my first introduction to the next system. That was great because... you know next did not have a huge stable of developers and you were getting experience on it from the get-go yeah this was uh next step 0.7
The university had a history of being involved pretty early on these things. I remember going to the introduction of... January of 1984 of the Macintosh and it showing up there. And then the university had a few inside Mac volumes that we could read through and learn about. Again, the Mac was too expensive for me, so I never got one at home. But I remember certainly salivating over them at the local computer shops. And when the university got some in a lab that I was helping manage them.
We played some Maze Wars or whatever. I had tons of exposure to Macs in those early days because my university had gone all in with the Macs. And like you said, you'd have a lab and you'd bring a pocket full of floppy disks and off you go.
But the next was a mystery computer to me. There were none of them available to me anywhere. Right. And I just knew it was some magical device that was like... better than anything out there but also unobtainable for me you know so so i never really got into it but you were you were lucky to have that exposure right because you eventually got into the business of making software for Next. Right, yeah. So this led, the way I kind of viewed the...
The next at the time was, well, the tagline for the Mac around that era was, the computer for the rest of us. And for me, the sort of unofficial tagline in my head for the next was, The computer for the other rest of us, the ones who wanted the Unix underpinnings and wanted to be able to program it and have all of that level of power and control that I was used to from being.
a programmer on a Unix system, but also have this great, easy-to-use interface and look and feel and windows that you could drag around and move live and resize. live and so on. It's not like Windows were unique to Unix. We already had X Windows on some workstations and digital workstations and so on. But having a really polished user experience on a Linux machine, that was, well, maybe Silicon Graphics could also fall into that camp, but it was not.
nearly as user-friendly as the Next was or as a Mac was. Yeah. The Next, I mean, you know... As I think about it, to this day, I've never sat in front of a Next computer. Stephen, have you got one in your collection? It seems to me like that would be natural. Yeah, I've got several. And it's amazing, especially later versions of Next Step and then...
OpenStep. It's amazing how many of the ideas from that became Mac OS X because, you know, Apple bought Next because Apple had failed multiple times to build. a true next generation operating system. And, you know, the Venn diagram of like what they took from the classic Mac OS and what they took from Next to like put into Mac OS X. There's a lot of next stuff in there. Obviously, there's the whole technology stack of being on top of Unix, like what Ken is saying.
Objective-C and object-oriented programming, but also just some of the interface ideas and the way that their file manager worked and the way Finder worked. It's really... It's like kind of, I mean, it is not Mac OS X. It doesn't feel like Mac OS X, but it feels like it's bizarro cousin. And it's, I mean, it's really pretty remarkable for a company that ultimately did.
fail, how many good ideas happened at Next and how a lot of those ideas are still with us today. It's really, I mean, the legacy of Next is really pretty mind-blowing, I think. Yeah, they had... a poster there at the beginning of the 90s saying something like, you know, over the next 10 years, there will only be, you know, 10 really interesting advancements, and here are eight of them. That was there.
They're bragging posters, you know, claiming, well, you know, we've got this great storage, the magnetic optical drive. We have DSP on there, so sort of this coprocessor. produce much higher quality sound. We have rich text. Anyway, the poster went through all of these sort of factors. And I don't know that all of those were really the strongest advancements of the decade, but...
Certainly, they laid a lot of groundwork for some of the things that were by far the biggest. I mean, I think the biggest advancement of the decade was the introduction of the web. And of course, that started on the next platform. And they did, of course, have a very enthusiastic CEO at the time. Yes, they did. At what point can you go from being the university network administrator to software developer?
Sure. So at the university, I mean, my actual job there was to be a systems programmer for a bunch of their Unix systems. And so I was writing software. bits of software actually I used for many decades afterward. It was like a bulletin board program that we used to communicate among the students there at the university. At the time, the university, I think, had about 40,000 undergrad students. It's a big university. It still is. And so that was kind of the project that...
introduced me to really working with Will Shipley, who was one of the other co-founders there at the Omni Group. And together then we were also kind of working on this game. For those who don't know, I also have this background in just enjoying games, all the way from, of course, arcade games and games on the Atari 800. Through the 80s, there were a bunch of...
games that you would play on VAC systems and Unix systems, things like Conquest or whatever. And then moving forward, then we were looking at, well, can we do some... something a little more interesting using the next platform. Do some graphics-based game that maybe is multi-user.
We never got super far on it. I'll say that right up front. But the game was called Omni, and that's part of the reason we ended up calling ourselves the Omni Group. And that's where those of us who founded the company met. Like having dinners at the end of the day and talking about how we're going to build this game and how it might work and building prototypes of various pieces and so on. I didn't know that. That's interesting.
So this is also at the time that my sister's D&D group from college had started. working on building their own company, doing games. Their games, though, were not at all on the computer. They were all, you know, it came from a D&D group. So the first stuff that they were writing were books about how do you... manage really advanced D&D characters as they get up with this book called The Primal Order. And then someone approached them about, well, I would love to publish a board game.
that involves moving robots around the moving board. Would you guys be interested in doing that? And they're like, well... That sounds like a lot of money for us to make all these miniature pieces and everything, but can you come up with a simpler game that we could just do with paper and printing stuff on paper? We know how to print books. We know how to print paper.
We could maybe figure out how to print a card game or something. And so that was when that group ended up creating Magic the Gathering. And because I was kind of their tech friend, one of their tech friends. I mean, one of the other founders was also... Certainly into computers and games at that time. But I ended up being the person who registered Wizards.com for them on the same day that I registered Omnigroup.com. Wow.
So, you know, as long as I was sending in the form, like, oh, might as well register one for us, too. And then we started helping them by hosting their mailing list for their distributors and playtesters and so on. So that was one of our first early founding clients, I guess you would say, of the Omni group was Wizards of the Coast. And we also helped them print out the prototype playtesting decks for like the...
the first printouts of magic before they actually had real artwork. So we were taking artwork out of the dictionary that was on the next. If you opened up Webster's Dictionary, which is bundled with the next, you could go look up certain words and you would see a little... line art illustration of that thing. And so for our playtesting purposes, we're like, well, here's some easy art we can kind of put in for
Planes, here's a picture of an airplane. And so on. Even though planes, in that case, in magic, was supposed to be a land that you're drawing your mana from. Sure. But yeah, it was... So that was one of our big projects. Another one of our big projects at the time was working with the big vendor. It was sort of the Adobe of the next software world.
which is called Lighthouse Design. Lighthouse, I mean, was a relatively small company. They had maybe five people or something. So not nearly Adobe size. But of course, Next was not nearly Apple size either. So in this smaller ecosystem, this was one of the bigger software vendors. And they were working on a suite of productivity apps to do diagramming, to do presentations.
outlines, things like that. So we started helping them build their software. So that was our second big sort of initial client in our consulting business. as we started this company. And then the third was Next themselves. They had a project where they had sold a whole bunch of workstations to the William Morris Talent Agency. los angeles and uh william morris had been you know one of the biggest talent agencies in town for much of the 1900s but in the 1980s they had not really kept up with
the computer revolution. They didn't put PCs on people's desks. And so when they got to the end of the 1980s, they were realizing that all their competitors were ahead in terms of keeping track of. what projects everybody was working on, what their bookings were, who their talents were, what their contact information was, and so on, because they were still just using pen and paper for everything. And so they realized they needed to catch up. They kind of did a survey. They thought, oh.
well, we have lots of money, and this Next computer thing, you know, it's expensive, but it looks like it's really great. Let's get one on every agent's desk. And so they had, I don't know, like a $10 million contract to outfit the whole company with Next. And part of that contract was supposed to be, you know, Steve had sold them on having custom software built for their company that would help manage everything sort of end-to-end in their business.
So we ended up working on that project. And that was our third big project as we started the company. Did you bump into Steve Jobs back in the day? I mean, were you in that orbit at that point? I mean, I think I bumped into him at Next World, at Next Step, at the various things, but not really. I don't know that he knew who I was until we wrote OmniWeb.
So that was a little bit later. We wrote the web browser that everybody ended up using if they were on the next platform. And I know he used that one for many years. And certainly we were at that point. I mean, it was such a small world back then. Yeah, absolutely. And of course, then Next itself, though it had some great technology, some great foundations for building a platform.
uh it it was too late to the game it was not really making headway against windows and the macintosh and so uh first their hardware business failed and then it looked like their operating system platform you know they had made they had ported their operating system before giving up on the hardware off to intel processors so you could in theory run it on a generic pc um had to be kind of a high-end pc but a pc nonetheless or you could
They partnered with HP Next to bring it to HP's line of workstations, as well as to their Intel performance systems, but their PA risk systems. And they also partnered with Sun to bring it to... Spark stations. But even all of those things are happening right as the web is starting to take off. Sun now gets a whole bunch of business.
as the company that is hosting a lot of the web servers that are out there and starts to get into this world of... job of programming programming stuff specifically for the web and they decide they're not really all that interested in openstep anymore so they ended up acquiring lighthouse design that um that sort of adobe of the next world that i mentioned earlier um
And because they wanted to have this whole suite of OpenStep software that would now run on their Spark stations as they started to have OpenStep on their Spark stations. Except then they shift directions and decide we're just going to do Java everywhere.
So Lighthouse, can you port your stuff to Java instead? And of course, as I mentioned, we were already working with Lighthouse at that time. So we started now working with the same team as they're now part of Sun. and help them build pieces of, you know, like the swing object library, you know, building a rich tech suite for...
for this new Java language environment, and then trying to help them port these serious productivity apps from the Next to this Java environment that we're making. And it's going okay. but we're not super excited about it, but it's better than having all of that technology go nowhere. Meanwhile, Steve Jobs has sort of lost interest.
he's getting distracted with the success of Pixar, and his attention is now shifted over there, and he's not really worried about his failing next company. And so that's sort of where we are at the end of... when then we get the news that Apple is buying next. And as soon as we do that, we all celebrate. How soon can we get out of this Java work and get back to doing programming in Objective-C and StaffKit? Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing. I mean, at so many turns, history could have gone differently.
But here you are today and you're working on the Apple platform and 30 years, almost 30 years after that acquisition. And that was not a safe bet to make. 30 years ago, right? I mean, the reason that people are looking at Java and other things is because the Mac isn't a viable platform in the late 90s, and they somehow...
pull this trick out of their hat of purchasing Next and rolling into Mac OS X. And here we all are, you know, years later, Mac OS X is now getting ready to be 25 years old in the spring. And it's just... I mean, what your timing coming into this industry and your choices and what platforms you were interested in and what y'all were going to work on.
I'm sure at many points, people may have looked over your shoulder and be like, what are you doing, man? Why are you dealing with Nex and these other things? But... In many ways, you've got the last laugh because that technology is what so much of our world is based on today. Yeah, we always had... We knew it was a long shot, I guess. You could say that. We kind of...
But it was a long shot that had a future that we really wanted to believe in. I remember making this choice at the beginning of the 90s of, well, do I want to invest my time? working on this next platform that has so few um you know there's so few next cubes out there compared to any other platform basically that i could choose and i had spent you know the previous five years or so working on
trying to create software for Unix systems that would run on as many Unix machines as possible. I was trying to be completely portable and have as broad an audience as possible. I guess if I was really trying to go for the... broad market i would have gone for windows instead but um but yeah so uh thinking about that choice well i could either spend um you know let's say
a month of effort designing this thing for Unix and cross-platform Unix and doing all this sort of extra work to reach a particular level of quality. Or I could spend... on the next platform as I learned AppKit and learned Objective-C and saw how much more productive it made me. I could spend maybe a tenth of that amount of time and just get a lot more done and have a much more rich product at the end.
Sure, it won't sell to as many people, but it's still going to be a much more interesting product that I can feel more proud about. And so I decided, well, let's see if we can go that route, and the one that makes us more efficient, and then... do what we can to help that platform succeed. And so that was sort of how we viewed our mission for
Most of the 90s was, okay, what can we do now to help NEC succeed? Oh, okay, you've got another reference customer over here at McCaw Cellular that became AT&T Wireless. How can we help them, you know, utilize your technology better? And so on. And the thing was, it was just so substantively better that, like, I'm sure part of you just wanted to be playing in that sandbox. Yeah. Yeah, it was more fun than nothing else.
Yeah, so it's been a pretty fun ride through all of these decades, for sure. Yeah. So a game idea becomes a Mac productivity software company, eventually. Along the way, we did do a lot of game work, to be fair. In the 90s, we helped John Carmack, who was building Doom and then Quake on the Next platform.
uh so when we you know realized what he was doing um and he was having trouble like getting the frame rate up on the next itself like he could get it faster on the pc and he was kind of okay with that for the most part so i helped him uh by
sharing you know here's a here's how you can use the interceptor library that's built into the next it's not it's not publicly documented there aren't any public headers but here's some headers that i can build for you and here's how you would link to this private thing and and so we got uh doom and then quake kind of running with acceptable uh frame rates there on the next which then led to us having this relationship with id software where as apple acquires next and
You know, they're looking at the Rhapsody strategy. And one of the concerns at that time was, well, what about all of these games that are used to taking over your whole machine? And how can you, can you really do a performance sensitive game? on a Unix platform. You know, this hadn't really been proven yet. So we ended up porting Quake over to what became Mac OS X server.
And then several Quake-derived games. And I think, oh, in the end, we probably helped bring 40 commercial games to the Mac platform, to Mac OS X, by about 2003 or so. This episode of Mac Power Users is made possible by 1Password. You probably saw in the news a couple of weeks ago that some 16 billion? With a B, 16 billion login credentials were leaked online. Services like Apple, Google, Facebook, and more potentially caught up in this.
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which I have a lot more context for now. What are you driving? What kind of Apple gear is on your desk these days? Oh, sure. So on my desktop right here, I have Mac Studio. that's somewhat aging. It's an M1 Mac Studio. That's not actually my primary machine. That's sitting underneath what is now my primary machine, an M4 Mac Mini.
an M4 Pro, whatever that model is called. Basically, we maxed out Mac Mini. That's an interesting decision. I mean, you run a software company. Obviously, you could justify going to the latest and greatest and most powerful Mac Studio, but you chose Mac Mini. Yeah, well, it's a great little machine, especially for what it does. And then I guess I hit this...
decision about, well, do I want the M3 studio or the M4 studio when the M4 studio can't have as much RAM as the M3 studio? Maybe I'll just wait, set it out and go for the M5 studio when that comes. But you're a desktop guy. So you want a desktop Mac? I want, well, so I also have. and use a maxed out Mac Pro M4. Okay. And so that's actually the fastest of all my systems, right? Because that one has more memory than the Mini here, and it's an M4.
But most of the time, yes, I live on my desktop, not with a laptop. And why is that? I guess just because I... my work patterns, and I tend to sit at a desk. And in theory, I could plug in the laptop here. But really, I like to have the laptop available for taking with me on the go or using elsewhere in the house when I do that.
I'll often use it with my Apple Vision Pro. And so I'll use that as the screen and I'll pair that up with the laptop. How often do you use the Vision Pro? I would say about five times a week. So most weekdays. What's your workflows with it? What are the things you do with it? So I mostly use my Mac with it. I guess there are two different types of activities that I'll do.
do on it right i'll have work time on it where i'm using my mac um and my macbook and using it as the screen and then i will uh also Sometimes. I haven't actually been using it too much recently for entertainment, but there was a time there when I was watching Severance. I like to watch Severance. My older daughter likes to watch Severance, but my older daughter is now...
left the household as she moved out on her own a few years ago. And so, you know, we would compare notes, but I was watching Severance on my own, not with other people in the house. And so...
Whenever you're watching media on your own, then that's actually, I think, a great opportunity to be using the Apple Vision Pro to watch the stuff because you can have your giant screen, you have good quality sound, and you can be... side by side with somebody else on the couch and not distract or disturb them at all they can be doing their own thing and so yeah so we kind of do a lot of parallel play we call it where we'll yeah you know be sitting next to each other in the same room um and
You can have that companionship, but be doing, you know, maybe watching your own thing. Now, when you say you do work on it, are you writing code in there using the virtual display? I mean, what type of work do you do in there? Yeah, so I'll use the Mac.
i don't know i remember the gesture i don't remember the name of the feature but the mac desktop remote display thing where you flip your hand over and then you go select from the uh okay i want to you know connect to my uh laptop screen and then You can put it in wide mode or ultra-wide mode, and I usually do wide mode. I don't need that big a screen where I'm turning my head back and forth. I'd rather move Windows around than move my head around, I guess.
And then, yeah, I'll just be using Xcode and Terminal and all of the things that I normally use when I'm at a desktop. And what I'll say for folks listening is that Ken is not... merely an administrative ceo uh having been on omni betas for you for Probably over a decade now. I often see commits from Ken Case at like 2 a.m. where something's getting fixed. It's like this guy's got his hands in the coat, too. He's not just a...
Not just at the top. Well, it's definitely the part of, I mean, that's one of the things I love about computers is getting into the code. What do you do with the iPad? So right now, ever since actually we started working remotely from home during the pandemic, the iPad sits on my desk for the most part, right next to my Mac.
screen so you know i've got my mac screen straight ahead of me and then i've got the ipad sitting on the desk to the right propped up at an angle and i use that for all of my video conferencing and then i'll switch back and forth between doing that or you know Sometimes I'll have OmniFocus on there. It's just kind of a dashboard that keeps me focused on, okay, what's on today's forecast or whatever. Yeah, the device is so good for an accessory to a Mac in that way.
I talk about it like your utility screen. And I often talk to people in my expert labs and listeners of the show who have an iPad in a drawer they're not using. And I tell them, just get it out and plug it in. and put it next to your Mac, you'd just be shocked how often you find use for it. It's also great for background, if you just want to have some YouTube noise on, but keep your full screen. You find all these great little uses for it. And Apple's done such a good job of...
giving you ways to turn it into a second monitor or just use your keyboard on the iPad operating system. It's got really easy to do that. Yeah, I used to use it a lot more when we were working in office and in person as something I would carry around with me to meetings and take notes on and so on. But since I'm usually at my desk now and the meetings come to me at the desk, then...
I still use it a lot for meetings. It's just that now it's not where I take the notes. It's where I see the other people in the meeting and then I can take the notes on the keyboard on my Mac. Ken, I'd love to hear a bit about sort of the state of the Omni group. Y'all have a whole suite of productivity applications, not only for the Mac, but across a bunch of Apple platforms.
Tell us a little bit about those apps, how you prioritize them, how you think about them. Y'all do this incredible thing. I look forward to it every year. Y'all lay out this big roadmap blog post where you talk about You go through the applications, you go through your plans for them. I assume that that takes a lot of planning as well. So I'd love to hear how you approach those things.
Sure, yeah. In fact, you're catching me right in roadmap season in our post-WWDC update. So I'm working on that right now as it happens. I mean, not this instant now, but this week. Sure. So, of course, the apps that we make are OmniFocus, our personal productivity, you know, keeping track of what you're trying to get done tool. OmniGraffle, which is our diagramming app.
which has a lot of history related to Lighthouse Design, that company I mentioned earlier. Their first big product was their diagramming app called Diagram on the next platform. And the person who created Diagram... after he finished his five years at Sun from that acquisition, came over and worked with us to start OmniGraffle. And so it's a very kind of direct bit of history there.
And then we have OmniOutliner. That one has some roots in being something that... I started a little tool to help keep my... My wife kept track of the books that we had around our house. And then it kind of grew into more than that. I'd been using outlining apps in some form or another from modes in Emacs to wherever since, I guess, the mid-'80s.
and just always wanted a great outlining tool. And I had been kind of cheating and using Concurrence, which is Lighthouse's presentation app, sort of like Keynote, the predecessor to Keynote. just in its outlining mode as my outliner back when we were on the OpenStep platform, the Next platform. But that, of course, didn't make its way over to the Mac, and so I decided we needed a good outliner there.
And then OmniPlan is our fourth product, and that one is our project management for professional project managers, where they have a team that they're trying to schedule. and figure out what pieces of something will be available, what the dependencies are between the tasks. what schedules different resources have, and then just trying to lay out everything in a sort of traditional Gantt chart or a PERT chart, and then work with it from there.
And that one also has some sort of family history because that was very much associated with the work my dad used to do when he worked for Boeing. He helped schedule the Saturn V first stage. in the 60s so and then went on to work on the scheduling 747 you know over and over again with as every plane was sort of unique and came off the line yeah if you listen to your show you know often
some little topic will come up that pulls me entirely off the outline of the show and into left field. When you just said your dad worked on, you know, the Saturn booster. Now I realize I need to hold Steven because I know exactly what he wants to do. He wants to spend three hours talking to you about your dad. Yeah, that is really cool. We can't do it. I will stay focused. We already talked about next step. Okay. Like we got it.
Right. I can only do so much. So those apps, of course, they all kind of started on the Mac before Apple had other platforms that were, I mean, they had the iPod, but it wasn't really a good target for any of these apps. And then the iPhone came out. And so the day that the App Store launched, we had OmniFocus ready for it, which is actually before it launched even.
Apple did the Apple Design Awards for that year, and they gave that sort of technology preview award for the iPhone 2 OmniFocus. So on the launch weekend, we had a really... amazing launch where it was one of the uh i think it was up to the second top grossing app for most of that weekend but and it was our fifth apple design award so we were pretty proud of that yeah that's awesome yeah i mean if i go back and look at you know you look at your
purchases historically i think omni focus was the first app i bought for the iphone well thank you yeah that was our only app that we brought to the iphone at first because the others felt like they needed a bigger screen when the ipad launched then we also uh we had as launch titles OmniGraffle and OmniGraphSketcher. And then we worked towards bringing OmniFocus, OmniOutliner, and OmniPlan over.
That was its own long transition, and we've probably talked about that on the show before in some context. Well, you know, it's interesting to me. Every one of your apps started life to scratch your own itch, you know? And people always say those are the best pieces of software, but I never realized it wasn't that you were identifying a market. It's like, no, my wife needed to track her book. So I made an outliner and that turned into on the outliner. I like that.
It certainly gives you more motivation, I think, and understanding at least some of your customer base. Now, of course, as we... As we started digging into OmniFocus, we've tapped into a very passionate customer base that have lots of different ways that they want to use the app. So it's not all about just how I use the app anymore in terms of what features are in there and so on. But it makes for a good grounding, I think, and a good place to start for what you're doing.
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and to show your support for the Mac Power users. And our thanks to Squarespace for their support of the Mac Power users and all of Relay. We're recording this just a few weeks after WBDC. And Ken, you've lived through a lot of these. And I'm sure there have been years that...
The keynote and the State of the Union wrap up and you look around and realize your plans for the rest of the year have been set on fire and thrown out the window. But before we get to that and what y'all are doing this year. Generally, how do y'all prepare for WWDC? What does the run-up to that look like for the Omni Group? And then how do you decide each year on where to focus? Sure.
WWDC is certainly the biggest sort of unknown in our calendar year every year. We're going to learn from Apple, whatever their teams, and they have a lot of teams, have been doing.
for the past year to advance the platforms that all of our apps use. So that's a pretty natural expectation that whatever's going to be news there is going to be big news for us as a company that is... completely built around building apps for apple platforms uh so as a result we think about you know through the year we think about what can we get done before wwdc
what are the things we really want to get done before WWDC? What are the things that we would love to get done, but it's okay if maybe it slips till later. And then what are the things that we know we should just plan? to wait and see what happens at WWDC and then make plans afterwards to figure out where we're going from there. That's kind of, I guess, the three categories of plans that we end up making. And sometimes...
we end up in a bit of a race because we're trying to get something done before WWDC. It's a big project. We don't, you know, we've been working on some of these apps now for over two decades. And so none of them are... small projects at this point they're all things that uh that we have invested a lot of time in and that when we make changes uh or make big plans for changes
there ends up being a lot of fallout. What are the changes going to be to the documentation? What are the changes going to be to all the localizations that we have for the countries around the world, the different languages that people speak? And so... Trying to get all of that work done can't always happen from one WWDC to the next, and we just have to expect that it'll be interrupted and we have to put it on pause and then readjust our plans. But some years we get very...
Lucky, the changes at WWDC are more... I mean, I think we've talked in the show before when we had sort of third-party developers come on and react to...
to announcements at WWDC. Some years we have a lot of homework or we have a lot of work we have to kind of figure out and do. Other years we have... a year of gifts where Apple just says, oh, well now here are some features that if you've been using our recommended techniques over the past few years, you get this other stuff now for free as well.
Or almost free, you know, you'll have to rebuild and maybe turn on some extra targets. And this year, we have a mix of both. Yeah. Where there's certainly a lot of... homework coming up with, you know, thinking about how liquid glass affects all of our app designs. But we also received, well, GIFs might be the wrong word to use because... GIFs imply that somebody just gave you something and it wasn't really based on what you had done. So maybe a better word in this case would be...
dividends, where gifts are nice to have, but dividends are things that you earned by making investments earlier in time. And so over the past five years, we've made some big investments in things like updating our apps to use SwiftUI. And that took some extra time on our part to move away from AppKit and UIKit and to use SwiftUI. But now as a result, it becomes much easier to...
reuse that SwiftUI code in more places as Apple extends widgets to more devices, CarPlay, Envision OS, and so on. And as we just see... Apple moved the platform forward and support things like Liquid Glass. Well, the mechanics of that adoption are a lot easier when you're using SwiftUI, which has easy layout kind of accommodations for that.
than if you're trying to lay it out the old ways with, well, there are lots of old ways. I guess we can talk about the many ways that you've laid out software on Avgit from the original springs and struts to auto layout. and down the line. Yeah, it's many times over the years there will be things in WWDCs that... you realize, like you said, dividend's a perfect word for it, that pay off later on, right? The year's like, hey...
maybe your app should know about different screen sizes. Like Apple, you have only ever shipped two screen, you know, then suddenly there's bigger phones, right? It's like, Oh, um, and you know, That is a side effect of Apple working, of course, years in advance. A lot of these things take a long time, and they're evolving as Apple itself works through them. And a lot of developers I've spoken to...
particularly this summer, have said the same thing. Like if you have been moving along with Apple as Swift and Swift UI have evolved and matured, and if you've paid attention to these other things, you are set up for Not necessarily that it's easy, it's not the flip of a switch, but an easier time preparing for liquid glass in this new user interface than if your head's kind of been in the sand for the last three, four, five years.
That's hard with a big application, I'm sure. I mean, you mentioned some of these apps or have, I'm sure, parts of them that have been around for a long time. But it's something you've got to do. So when these big changes come, you can be ready. Yeah, absolutely. And sometimes the reason Apple is asking you to do something, as you mentioned, are not at all obvious. And sometimes when you look back, it becomes much more obvious in retrospect, whether it's, you know, like the...
the windows that can be resized now on the iPad, or whether it's... Oh, I remember when Apple brought Safari to the iPhone, it suddenly became much more clear why over the past few years... they had been prioritizing the performance of Safari over the correctness of Safari. Because we'd been wondering, why are you not fixing this bug?
you know, you're intentionally doing something in kind of a way that's not compatible with websites? Isn't compatibility with websites the most important thing for a web browser to do? And the answer is, of course, yes, it is if you're just looking at the web browser on the Mac. But if you're looking at the web browser on a phone where you have hardly any processing power available, relatively speaking, and your whole goal is just to get something on there at all.
And now it becomes a lot more clear why, okay, yeah, we're willing to make some sacrifices for speed, even if it means now we're breaking some things that people have come to expect on the web. And so we see those kind of moves happen.
on the platform in other areas just over the years you know some of the things that were being done on on the platforms became more obvious when the vision pro shipped and i'm sure some of the moves we're looking at This year will become more obvious in another year or two down the road when other things ship that we just don't know anything about right now. Well, I mean, you guys kind of famously were one of the first kind of battleship apps to take on SwiftUI.
That was not an easy task. I mean, I think you've kind of said publicly that it took longer than you wanted and it was a lot more work. But ultimately, now are you feeling good about that? yeah it certainly has left us in a good place for this year right yeah exactly changes like we're doing and we we did get some benefits out of it sooner than this year with
easier cross-platform sharing of our inspector code and so on. But yeah, it was definitely a process that took longer than we originally anticipated, and we had to wait for Apple to make some changes before it was practical to chip. Now, this year we got liquid glass. What do you think of it? That is a landmine, isn't it? I've read a lot of opinions out there. Overall, I think...
Well, I think it is beautiful. And that is something that I feel like we were sort of missing from the iOS 7 transition on. things just got so spartan that we had lost some of that beauty in the platform. There's certainly some struggles yet with legibility and so on. But I'm not sure... I feel like some of those struggles are overplayed or taking its use out of context, maybe not where Apple intends it to be used, or maybe not thinking about how users will actually be using it.
For sure, if you overuse Liquid Glass, you're going to have some big problems with legibility. And so we're trying to be careful about that as we think about where do we use Liquid Glass in our apps. You know, Apple's recommendations are not that you use it for, that you use it everywhere, that you're supposed to try to use it on things that are maybe floating over your main content, and there shouldn't be very many of those.
Right. And so it makes sense if you look at OmniFocus, for example, on the iPhone, we have a couple of floating buttons that represent opening something quickly. There are quick open button and there are quick entry buttons.
Both of those seem like great candidates for liquid glass. You don't have to worry too much about are they legible or not. The stuff behind doesn't need to be legible. It used to be completely hidden. The stuff in front, you know what those two functions are. You're scrolling it.
always see it. So nothing is changing about that. So it makes sense where the interface is otherwise stable, I guess is kind of what I'm getting at. If you're overusing it and you're putting it on controls that are changing all the time and now you're trying to... decipher those controls every time you look at your screen but your screen is harder to decipher because of the liquid glass effect being there then that seems like that that is one of the ways that
that people get frustrated with what's happening with it. Another thing that I really like about the liquid glass look is that we're finally starting to see a return to... better indications of where controls actually begin and end. I can tell where the edge of a button actually is instead of just wondering in the iOS 7 button world.
well if i tap here is that going to actually activate that symbol or not yeah on the mac the same thing uh was true with um you know with recent bringing that kind of ios 7 aesthetic over to the mac I've been hearing from listeners and labs numbers saying, well, is it just like, are we just going to Windows Vista on the Mac? And I think that you have to use it to appreciate, because it's not that. It's not. Windows Vista was...
it was without editing, you know, the way they did it. This is much more subtle. And I think the thing that keeps coming to me having spent time now in the betas is... is kind of whimsy and delight in the operating system again. And that's the words that come to me. It's not that it feels modern, but it feels a little more whimsical and joyful.
And when I go to my old system that Steven won't let me update, it feels old and freaky and not as joyful and not as whimsical. So I feel like they're onto something. Yeah. And Ken, I think you're exactly right. I mean, in my exploration of it, it is best done, I don't want to say sparingly, but especially that clear glass control, like over buttons or things.
You can overdo it. I think a lot of developers, as we speak over the summer, are learning that just in their own exploration of like, oh, if you glassify everything, it's just a mess.
Looking through Apple's first-party apps on the iPhone and iPad in particular, I think you can get a good feel for what Apple has in mind here. And there are clearly cases where it really shines, where you've got... content behind it like maps is actually maps and photos are two of my favorite examples of it on the iphone of like
There's this big map, you know, full bleed edge to edge, or my photos are edge to edge as they scroll underneath these buttons and the light refracts and reflects within the buttons. And it is really beautiful. when done correctly. And it'll be exciting this fall as app updates roll out to see where everybody landed. And I really think just like iOS 7, there will be a period where people figure that out.
And maybe we see some apps get updated again where they dial it back or they tune it with feedback from their users. It'll be a process, but I think... seeing Apple's first-party apps is a really good example of kind of where it's effective and where it works. Yeah, I agree. And then bringing the fun back, as David said, is, I think, an important element.
It helps people connect with their devices when the devices have some whimsy and some just aesthetic appeal. Which is funny, because at the same time, I feel like, and you as an old Next and Mac guy can appreciate this. I feel like a lot of the whimsy in the operating system is kind of slowly being pulled out. I mean, people were writing me about the Mickey Mouse hand going away and things like that. They are flattening the whimsy.
on one level, but at the same time bringing it back with this liquid glass. It also really helps from my point of view as a developer who makes software that runs across all of these platforms to have controls that... look more like each other across the different platforms i mean they're still not identical or anything but they're certainly um closer than they had been without losing all of their character which is kind of what i felt like was
is happening when the iOS 7 look was coming to the Mac. And it's funny because everybody says this is based on Vision OS, but Vision OS feels like an outlier among all of them. Yeah, I'm not sure I see the, I mean, obviously there's some transparency that is involved in Vision OS, but yeah, I wouldn't call it based on. Yeah, yeah.
Fair enough. Well, it's impressive that they did all these platforms in one year. And I hope that helps you get kind of a unified look for everything. What is your most... delightful bit of all the new stuff that came out this year that that makes you smile oh interesting i think Well, so we've talked about liquid glass. I certainly enjoyed that piece. But another piece, it's really kind of behind the scenes and we're not going to feel the effects for...
Well, I guess we'll see how soon we feel the effects, because it's partially up to developers, is Apple opening up their AI story with the foundation models. And in other ways, right? Like they're not just with the foundation models, but with Xcode now, not only talking to Apple's models, but...
In fact, not talking at all to their own models and others, just talking to third-party models or your own local models and so on. But Apple, I think, is at its best when it is busy shepherding the platform and not trying to... promote just a single solution that they are the only provider for, right? And so when...
There's no need for Apple to be the best AI developer on the platform as long as all of the best AI developers want to be on their platform. That's the trick, right? AI needs to be a commodity for Apple to succeed with this. Yeah, and Apple makes great hardware and a great operating system. And so already all of those players are on their platform. And so it's great to see Apple maybe start to recognize that.
they don't have to play it alone anymore, that they can just help shepherd the ecosystem in the right direction. So with the foundation models, for example, we now see, well, it took very little time, like within just a few. Within a day of experimentation, I had added support to Omni Automation plugins to be able to talk to the local foundation models and ask questions like, okay, well, can you tell me?
Can you generate a list of steps that I would need to install solar panels on my home? And then it would spit back some OPML or whatever, and then you could say, okay, now import this into OmniFocus, and now you've got a project that's built just from asking a query.
of this plugin and having it insert the tasks. That's got to be one of the challenges for you. It's like now that you have the ability, it's like, where do you actually use it in your productivity suite? Like where does AI even make sense for?
your users right and a lot of users have a lot of ideas for where it makes sense and they've sent a lot of great suggestions already and uh and of course we're going to think about some of the ideas they've proposed and what ought to be built in But at the same time, I really want to be cautious. of our users would rather not have AI infect their apps, kind of how they feel about it, or infect their data. And so I wanted to be under their control at all times and for them to decide.
where it makes sense for them or not and where they want to leverage it or not and so that's one of the places where being able to build it into the plugin system is so powerful because now you can install a plugin that does this thing if you want to use it and if you don't want to use it you just leave that out
I have to admit calendars and tasks are like a hard line for me with AI where I just don't want it helping. I just, you know, I think I need to be the person who decides what I'm going to do and what I'm going to do it ultimately. And maybe someday I'll be convinced otherwise, but every experiment I've made with AI on those fronts has convinced me that I'm better at it and I need to take responsibility for it myself.
But maybe I'm sounding old and cranky now. Well, to me, you're sounding like an expert in those topics. Much like I don't feel like I want the AIs to be... programming my software because every time I look at what kind of code they generate, it seems like why would you do it that way? That's a terrible idea.
Right. Yeah. That that's actually a question because like you are one of the most experienced programmers on the platform between your next and your Apple, you know, experience. And now we've got.
ai writing code for people you know there's this whole vibe coding movement where people who don't even know how to program are making their own apps and and um have you like dipped your toes into that and like what are what's your feelings about it as someone who who is really one of the foremost experts in this platform so while i consider my i do i think i'm an expert in this platform i'm not an expert in ai stuff and that's partially because of my bias against
running anything else on other people's computers and feeding them data yeah so all of my ai explorations are things that involve local models that i've run on my local systems and i know that the local models are not as advanced as competitive as some of the models now that the commercial folks are selling, right? So I don't have experience with those models necessarily, although I certainly...
watch other people's experience and the sorts of things they ask and how they shepherd things through. My feeling is that The AI stuff is a really great way to get going when you're maybe not the expert, right? And you need some help to figure out what to do next. Or maybe you are the expert and you just feel like the whole process of coding is tedious and you want it to do all the...
tedium and then you're going to review it later right and you feel like you can be comfortable doing that there are certainly places where i guess i feel like it's useful and there's no reason to back away from it just because it's ai um
from a pragmatic, I'm trying to get things done point of view. There's also still the question of how these things are trained. There are a bunch of ethical questions that are involved as well. I think it is possible to train this stuff ethically. I don't know that everything that... that is available has been trained ethically though or i'm sure a lot of it is not and so um so there's that issue as well but um but i think
Ultimately, much like compilers made it much easier for people to write code and better programming languages help people write code better. When I say write code better, I guess I mean... make them more productive at building code, building applications that they weren't otherwise building. We don't see people building like OmniFocus scale products just using assembly code.
But any assembly language programmer might look at the output of a compiler and say, oh, I know I could do that part of it better. And I think that some of that same stuff applies now to what we're seeing with AI code and so on. And as a result, we're going to see some of the same sorts of issues crop up that we saw crop up with programming languages, where a lot of the security holes that we have had over the last few decades have had to do with how the C programming language thinks about
strings and data, right? And allocating and retrieving that memory and whether it's being used appropriately. When you switch to better programming language, you can kind of eliminate some of those issues and you have fewer bugs, right? If you switch to Rust or something.
And now I think as people are building, vibe coding up websites, they're going to be creating websites that have security holes, that have all kinds of things. They're going to accomplish things that they weren't able to accomplish before. But those things might...
Might have a lot of bugs. I guess it's kind of where I'm going. Yeah, I think that's a fair summary. But you might get a lot of stuff done, particularly for one-off tasks where you're not concerned so much with the... a tool that you use to create the output with the ultimate output, then if you consider the AI process to be part of the tool set that you're using to create it, you do your one-time thing, maybe you're making...
Well, to go back to my example from earlier, you're asking it, what are the steps to do with solar panels to my house? Is it going to get all those steps correct or not? I have no idea. But as you get into that list, how serious is it if you've got it wrong? maybe not that terrible, because as you go through it, you'll realize, oh, they left out a step, or no, that's redundant, or no, I just don't care. Like, you're self-editing as you process that result.
And obviously it's all a moving target. These things are getting better very fast. Right. And I was talking to a friend who does development and he said he's using it as a kind of. a prototyping tool like i i have an idea let me vibe code up something this guy's a programmer just to see if it's even a good idea and if it you know
If the Vibecode version seems like a tenable idea, then I'll go through and actually make it properly. And I thought that was an interesting use. Yeah, absolutely. And I know people are also using it.
in the other direction where they're not generating code with it. They're using it to help understand code that is already there. So the last question's about it. Again, I don't know that it always gets those answers right. But maybe it helps you kind of... start to find your way around the codebase and then you get more of the answers yourself.
Last question on AI. Apple made private cloud compute available to users via shortcuts, but not to developers, if I understand that correctly. So are you able to address? pcc now in app or is that something that that users have to do directly via shortcuts so my understanding uh is that the apis we have there is are just for accessing the foundation model
that runs on your local device. And so far that's been okay for the kinds of examples that I'm throwing at it, but I'm sure that can't do as rich things as if we could use private cloud compute. Yeah.
And it's pretty good. I mean, it's not competitive with OpenAI, but I feel like for a lot of the stuff I do, it's good enough. That's actually been, for me, maybe the big... saving grace of our apple intelligence this year's access to pcc i've had a lot of fun accessing it and building into shortcuts so i'm sure i'll be doing that eventually with my omni focus shortcuts too well and there's some things that
Another good example, I guess, that some people have suggested is, well, could you use a shortcut that would automatically tag? suggest tags to use from your OmniFocus database based on what you entered in as a title. And there is something where you'll immediately see if it got it right or wrong. It's just a suggestion. It's easy to edit and correct. The cost of being wrong is not that terrible.
the potential savings is maybe useful. Kim, we always like to wind up these shows talking to our guests about some of their favorite apps and services and things they use that folks listening may be interested in.
Tell us some of the apps and services that bring you joy and delight. Sure. So as I was thinking about this question a bit, a lot of my life just revolves around the tools that... that come with the system and terminal and long history kind of around all of that but there are a number of tools that i i tend to use pretty frequently there uh you know that if i look right now there
most likely open in my dock, probably on multiple devices. And so I thought that was worth calling out, I guess. So one is that I use, I tend to use self-hosted. You may have already gotten this from some of my earlier conversations. But things that, where I'm not sending my data to other people's devices, I do that both because I know that I can manage my devices and data, and if something goes offline, I've still got it all.
And just, I don't know, there's a feeling of security knowing that the data is all under my control. And let's face it, under... At heart, you're still a Unix warrior. You're still back in the lab running that next machine, right? I've been self-hosting my email since 1985. Yeah, I totally believe that. So for passwords, for example, I'll use the Strongbox app, which I can't remember what the... There's actually...
a standard data file format that they use for those passwords that is shared with some other apps as well. And it's just one of the apps that works with that standard format. that feels like it's really well integrated on Apple's devices. It's on my phone, it's on my laptop, it's on...
I can basically have it everywhere. It can sync its data through iCloud. It uses Face ID or Touch ID to unlock and things like that. And so it's good integration, but keeps all my passwords and keeps track of them. I guess I'll have to say that. For music, kind of the same sort of thing. I used to use iTunes music. That's where I have bought and still buy, I guess, most of the music that I didn't own previously already from CDs and so on.
But I never liked storing my stuff on other people's clouds, so I have all of that data stored on my Synology server at home, and then it's managed through... a third-party open-source thing called Jellyfin. And then another open-source app for the front-end for Apple devices is called Finamp that connects to those and plays that music back.
And that lets me download the music and have it offline so I can have it on my phone even if I'm on a road trip somewhere with no data signal or something. Yeah, I mean, that's, you know, I've... Almost everybody has just gone to Apple Music at this point. Or what's the bigger competitor? Spotify. Spotify. That's interesting that you're doing it yourself. I kind of love that.
Well, I guess it's kind of my MO. I know it's a little bit off the beaten path. And you're a music lover, so I imagine you've got a big library. all self-hosted it gives you a lot of control i'm sure yeah uh then for uh another app that i that i use quite frequently is uh for social media connecting to
to all of the other developers in the community. Well, not all of them, but many other developers in the community and so on, mostly on the Mastodon platform. And then the front end that I use for Mastodon is TapBot's ivory app. And I've been using Tapbots for, well, I was using their Tweetbot before Twitter cut that off. And then when Twitter cut that off...
I found that that mostly cut off my usage of Twitter just because that was how I interfaced with Twitter. If it's no longer there, then I'm no longer there. That's one of the best Twitter client pivots, right? tap bots they really because they had a great app and they've done a great job of just kind of be staying relevant getting into mastodon and other platforms good for them yeah yeah i appreciate the work they've done For sound, both for...
kind of capturing and manipulating audio. Rogamiba makes great apps. So they have, of course, Audio Hijack, which I'm using to record my end of this podcast right now. And they also make Fission, which is a great...
a tool for editing the audio afterward, doing things with it. It's sort of relatively lightweight. I'll use that to cut off stuff from the beginning of a... music piece maybe that i've recorded and then uh stuff at the end we were doing that when we were oh when i was rehearsing with james dempsey uh for the
james mc and the breakpoints um performance at wwdc uh you know i took some of the previous recordings and used vision to edit them into a little playlist that then i could load into onto my phone and fin amp and And then just listen to it to make sure I had all of the transitions right in my head. You know, these apps, these Rogamiva apps come up all the time, especially when talking to podcasters, because this is kind of our lifeblood of keeping things going.
But we hear from so many listeners that are not podcasters that have found uses for Rogue Amiga software. Rogue Amiba, I don't know where we'd be without them in terms of the audio situation on the Mac. I guess we'd all be using... overblown heavy tools, right? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, I appreciate their dedication to that audience for decades now, really. Yeah.
And then the last two things that I'm going to list here are actually kind of corner apps made by sort of design developers that we use to help figure out things that we're trying to do when we're designing an app. And so Clarko makes this app called Symbolsaurus for exploring the SF Symbol library. And, you know, he's gone through and... categorize like he's gone through and audited a whole lot of apps both built-in apps and third-party apps and
looked at the symbols, and then looked at how they were being used. And okay, well, here are all of the symbols that have been used for pause or play or stop or whatever, you know, these different things. And so when you go, you can search for... either the symbol name directly, but you can kind of do that in any SF symbol browser, or you can search for how it's been used. And it's nice to, you know, maybe help us all.
as a community develop a common design language for this symbol means this thing yeah this is great i i just downloaded it sf symbols are so useful and uh it is hard to navigate though because there's just so many and he has it available on uh i think pretty much every apple platform And then Harley Thomas makes this app for exploring SwiftUI controls and layouts on different platforms. It's called Interactful. And so, you know, sometimes when I'm thinking, okay, well, I remember...
seeing this control used in an app or in a place, but I don't remember what it's called. It's a way I can kind of browse through the controls. and see what it looks like and see what it looks like on different platforms. So I can open it up on my Mac, but then I can open up the same app and look at the same sort of controls. on my iPhone or my iPad or on the Apple Vision Pro. And, you know, all of those sometimes have subtly different ways, particularly prior to OS 26.
the subtly different ways of looking at how they might present pop-ups and things. So it's just a useful tool to kind of help remind me, okay. How does this selector look on this platform? What I love about both of these apps is that they're by developers for developers and designers both. These are just tools from people who want Apple's ecosystem to be better, very clearly built out of love for these platforms. And I think it's so cool that they exist. Yeah, me too.
Well, Ken, where should people go if they want to check in on what you're up to? Sure. So as I just mentioned, for social media, I tend to be on Mastodon more than anywhere else because that is where... Ivory exists where chat pods move their device. So you'll find me at kcase at mastodon.social. You can also send me email, of course. longest lived social media option for my email address has been the same now for 34 years.
We're coming off on 34 years later this year. So it's KC, my initials, at omnigroup.com. Well, I am just so pleased that many years ago you decided to take a... a shot at the next platform that led to so many decisions that give me these great applications on my Mac and appreciate what you do at the Omni group. I know a lot of our listeners are avid users of your software.
And I love the amount of detail and attention you bring to your apps. And thank you for sharing the story with us today and all the great work you do over there at the Omni Group. Thank you. And of course, it's not just me there. We've got a great team. I am a fan of you and your company, but just having the opportunity to visit you back in the day at your offices, it's like every room had another...
man or woman in it that is just dripping with competence of app development and design and all the great stuff you do. You really have a great team. So we'll put the links to all that in the show notes. We are the Mac power users. You can find us at relay.fm slash MPU. If you'd like to join and become a member, you can do that also at relay.fm slash MPU. That gets you the ad free.
extended version of the show today we're going to be talking to ken about software transitions thank you to our sponsors one password and squarespace and we'll see you next time