Apple added an orange dot that’s a showstopper for live visuals
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EDIT: As far as I know, the best long-term answer here is for apps that present visuals full screen to "capture" the external display for exclusive use using an API (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coregraphics/14562...), but that's not super common right now.
"The Dropbox badge
"Seeing who’s viewed your files
"Better prioritization for file syncing"
https://help.dropbox.com/installs-integrations/desktop/mac-p...
Using the API to disable the dot requires some pretty scary permissions to be enabled on the app disabling the dot.
To us software folks, I t makes sense, but I imagine this'll be linked to many individuals outside of software who won't know even what git is or how to get the fix.
If I'm understanding you correctly, that means there's already a supported workaround for this if apps just use that API? I don't want to downplay the annoyance of this for apps that aren't using that API, but this suggests there's already an official answer.
I'm mildly surprised the orange dot shows up in full-screen apps; I was going to suggest that might be the easiest "fix" for Apple to make that doesn't require either adding a new security setting or taking away the indicator entirely -- have it only show up in the menu bar, and not when the menu bar isn't present.
I ask earnestly if the change is really such a substantial one?
I have mixed feelings after reading the comments as I think that there are fairly valid arguments in both directions (e.g., that the solutions are plentiful, but also that workarounds aren't really a solution), but the arguments feel a bit empty if there's a "right" way to be handling the visuals that just isn't being used.
As a user I like the change in general as I have caught naughty applications that try to use mic input when I really don't want it, and my misclick/absentmindedness is not uncommon, so seeing such things helps a lot as I don't really think it's reasonable to constantly be checking the various app permissions to make sure they're what I want. This is a good reminder for me.
But I totally get not wanting the dot, as it's even been a prank on a site I go to to have a tiny red pixel just to annoy people (and it's a prank I've used). So I get the frustration with an unexpected visual. But, if there's a way to do the same activity by having the app utilize the correct API, it seems like an issue that is solved in the next update from these visual production apps, no?
I don't think this API helps people that use display out, like a projector or screen.
Hacky way to have it running all the time :
I put this into a bash file to run the loop in the background at boot.
Just add the .sh in Preferences > Users & Group > Login Items
Then don't forget to chmod +x the bash file so it can be run.
--
#!/bin/bash
nohup bash -c 'while :; do /Users/starmina/Scripts/undot/undot; sleep 1; done' </dev/null >/dev/null 2>&1 &
--
I'd be glad to hear a of a better way to do it.
I made a Swift app using the same method so that non-technical people can also use it: https://lowtechguys.com/yellowdot
[1] https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/decklink/techspecs... (4K, PCIe) https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/ultrastudio/techsp... (less than 100 bucks, but only 1080p on Thunderbolt) (SDK: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/developer/product/capture-a...)
edit: looking at your updated post, it is called a "playback card."
This way, you know EXACTLY what the program is computing, nothing else.
Also what’s the use case where they can’t export the video and transfer it as a file or byte stream?
Use case: live (minimizing latency), no compression, compatibility with other gear.
The cheapness of greenscreen effects makes it pretty cheap to use in TV shows a lot these days though.
Big productions can afford Decklinks and media servers like Disguise D3.
Maybe some of those guys scraped together enough money to buy one of the new macbooks (since it got HDMI back). Being forced to spend another $200 to get rid of a stupid orange dot would really sting.
Of course, I'm also confident that software workarounds will exist in the meantime.
So long as they keep NDI Tools free. It would be great if they could also eventually build in some of the functionality of Dante (NDI is something like Dante but for video) since the Dante software toolkit is very much not free. I think Newtek has been on the right track.
Indeed, we use three of the Flex 4K Out boxes to three projectors doing alpha blending to form a single virtual screen via ProPresenter and it works great!
Especially since someone donated an M1 Mac Mini, not realizing it only supported two traditional external monitors. With NDI we could have an external monitor for the operator display then let ProPresenter generate three virtual monitors via NDI. We can send differently formatted "screens" via NDI to our OBS computer for streaming too - different configurations of lower thirds for texts, full screen mirroring of the main presentation display - whatever we need. NDI really works a treat and I will NEVER go back to analog video again!
We also use the Birddog NDI PTZ cameras for streaming and some crude IMAG too - it's amazing how well NDI works.
I think the migration costs (including the learning curves) might seem like a poor tradeoff.
Edit: Just checked because I was curious. The default installs of VLC do not include Blackmagic support but you can compile versions from the source for Linux that include it (if you also download the support files from Blacklink first).
https://github.com/videolan/vlc/blob/master/modules/video_ou...
Though a quick search through online forums suggest that module isn't compiled into Ubuntu's version of VLC by default, so you may need to compile your own version:
https://gist.github.com/afriza/cd9ce01a7b47b9bd3f192e95af1a0...
As a hacker without a horse in this particular race (Macs and I parted ways a long time ago), it's definitely interesting to observe the interactions between the two groups in this thread!
IMHO the fundamental difference between the two sides is that when it's posited as a dogmatic matter, it's immediately clear whether or not your (perceived) rights have been violated (Can you do X? No => Violation, Yes => Keep chugging along) but for the latter group it becomes not just a question of whether or not X is possible but also whether or not each individual can agree that X should/shouldn't be determined by the vendor/manufacturer (c.f. the recent hullabaloo about on-device scanning).
I see similarities to the concept of "I may not agree with what you are saying, but I will fight to the death for your right to do so," which just makes it so much easier to agree on whether or not rights are being infringed, regardless of it's something you'd want to engage in yourself or otherwise.
General purpose computing was supposed to be for everybody, not just approved use(r)s. Apple once told me that. It was a long time ago.
- The app outputting video can use an OS-level API to capture and fully control the external display.
- The Mac owner can use a playback card to output a clean video stream.
- The Mac owner can use their root control of the machine to disable the dot. (A short script to do so is currently the top comment.)
So really, Apple has not taken away rights here. Clean video output is still possible. They have changed a default, though.
I wouldn't call this changing a default. If this were windows and my only option was 1) Petition the developer to rewrite their app 2) Buy more hardware 3) Edit the registry...
I would not consider that a mere change to the default.
Case in point, my mom is getting paranoid about this stuff after watching stuff on Netflix and CNN about how Facebook is "listening in" on her. I can easily just tell her to watch for the dot and know, with reasonable certainty, that she didn't install some app on her own that would hide that.
Nothing about this scenario would change if Apple chose to include a setting in the system menu that turns it off. You would just tell your mother not to mess with that setting... which you've presumably already done for numerous other settings.
The obvious solution would be some sort of prominent warning that disabling this setting might allow malicious behavior or something, but many people are so inured to frivolous warnings that it might not work. I think the only fix to that is to make it even harder to disable, but I'm no UX expert.
I still think Apple should walk it back a little but pretending like that doesn't have unintended consequences is kinda foolish.
Don't nerf my computer because your mother can't be trusted with the digital equivalent of an electric carving knife. Just add a few more warning labels and let Darwin sort it out.
A feature like this shouldn't come as a surprise in an update. When deployed via the update, it should be optional and disabled by default. It should only be enabled by default after a major OS release, where UI changes are expected. (And, enabling a feature like this should be part of the typical beta/preview process that happens for all major OS releases.)
That being said: I wonder if covert audio recording on Mac is a problem. IE, did Apple need to "do something" about people being targeted by malware that records their audio?
It doesn't have to be an all or nothing situation if Apple is even remotely interested in addressing this use case, which they should be.
I think the reality is that the set of people who want the feature and who would use it in a live professional environment with expensive hardware and who can't afford a $100 dongle from BlackMagic is so close to the null set that Apple is unlikely to care.
For goodness sake, Apple's own HDMI dongle costs $70. Just spend $30 more and buy the BM one instead.
I used to be.
> It's also a false choice
Yes, yes it is. It's been like this for decades. Entertainers are expected to buy the most expensive hardware available even when they're just getting started. Conform or be stigmatized for using inferior technology. We're talking about an industry in which AudioQuest has no trouble selling passive 3m HDMI cables for upwards of $1k.
Maybe this is the first time Apple has stepped on your toes, but it won't be the last. Be prepared to fork over the cash for a specialized dongle you wouldn't need on any other platform, lest that orange dot mar your reputation.
Let's be real: this isn't going to harm Apple's sales in the slightest, and they know it. The only way they could possibly harm their reputation in the entertainment industry is by lowering their prices, opening up their ecosystem, and eliminating $1k monitor stands.
They know you'll ultimately cough up the dough for an adapter, no matter how much you complain. They know you don't have a choice. They get money from me, a privacy-conscious end user with a choice, and they get money from you, a disgruntled professional without a choice.
It's not necessary to force that choice.
How is offering an option for it to ONLY be visible when the menu bar is also visible compromising the notification in any way?
There are software solutions like NDI that the hardware solution doesn't fix and why should I have to buy hardware to fix a problem that should have never existed in the first place?
It's asinine and really not that complicated - don't show UI shit on displays that aren't showing the menu bar. There is always one display that must have a menu bar - show crap like this there and only there.
Yes, there are workarounds. But artists shouldn't have to deal with that when it worked perfectly fine beforehand. In addition, the more stuff you add to your setup, the higher chance that something will go wrong.
The right call her for Apple is to allow users to give permission to specific apps to disable this but let's not start with the idea that pros are outputting directly from their computers without the right hardware.
Have you ever worked in this industry? Because yes they absolutely are.
The people building the video walls (renting them), and the people actually running the visuals are not the same people.
All anyone in this thread is implying is that, if this is important to you, you need to have the hardware to do it. If Microsoft tomorrow decided to put a Windows logo in the corner of the screen just to say "fuck you", you would still be unaffected with a hardware I/O device.
And without the orange dot issue, it wasn't necessary to have absolute perfect control. (Which could still go wrong anyway, because it's a computer.) Making it necessary all of a sudden is bad.
Or to put it another way, even without a hardware controller it was possible to have your macbook's use of an external output be one of the strongest links in the chain. Which is enough. Was enough.
Not if you need to be able to decide was is and isn't displayed. The I/O subsystem on Monterey is almost exactly the same as it has been since like Mavericks. If it was enough in the past because people were lucky, then that's awesome. There are ways to deal with the dot if people want to continue running these setups off of luck and ignorance. I'm only arguing against the people that say the dot makes their setup "unusable" and somehow ruins their livelihood.
> Just turn off whatever recording device is active
It seems you haven't considered that the most obvious scenario someone would be annoyed about this is during a multimedia presentation when they're running both a video output and recording audio over top, an extremely common use-case that performers I personally know take part in. Suggesting this clearly non-technical individual to turn off SIP and compile and run some arbitrary code from Github is laughable to me.
They're not, though. I only used notifications and the like because they were common things that people probably have experienced outside of this specific situation. It doesn't have to be that. It could have been a microphone icon or a speaker icon or literally whatever the OS wants to display. And I'm not even arguing that it's unreasonable to complain about the recording indicator. I'm arguing that people who claim that something being on screen that they didn't want makes their workflow "unusable". If that was the case, there are solutions for that and they've been around for years. Just because they weren't affected by their ignorance in the past doesn't excuse that.
>clearly non-technical individual
If this person is that non-technical, then something like this is definitely not a showstopper that makes it "unusable". They are not the people I'm directing these comments at.
Doesn't fix the orange dot, but it helps pretty much everything else.
Helps but doesn't solve. There is nothing that you can do to remove the OS's ability to put things on a secondary display outside of your control. The only option is to have a separate I/O controller.
Most will be using HDMI out as a second screen, so those won't show up
> Yes. I currently work in this industry
What do you use for video output? I'm a hobbyist and used iPad & TouchViz with HDMI plug. I just picked up Resolume and planned to use a Mac Mini M1 w/ Monterey and HDMI out. I'm livestreaming, so I'm only doing 1080.
To have this be a business blocker, they clearly not only don't have any other standard tools available to prevent this display issue, but they also upgraded their OS, can't roll back to an earlier backup (probably don't have backups), and did all this on the machine used for the presentations, without any alternatives.
That's a shocking lack of care and they deserve to receive flack for it. You test that kind of thing well before the event, and then you do not touch anything. Least of all upgrading the OS. I can't help but assume that these people are just using their personal laptops and hoping for the best on the day of an event. If they are, a small orange dot is the least of their concerns, and serves as a nice canary to their employer.
And, again, we are talking about situations where this orange dot would make the function "unusable". Those situations are not situations where a professional uses the built-in I/O and leaves things to chance.
It sounds like there’s something about all of these responses that isn’t resonating with you because I see a pattern of responding and letting us know our experiences are essentially invalid, for some reason. Are you able to speak to why that’s important to you? Why does this seem so far-fetched / unbelievable to you?
Someone spends a thousand, or two thousand dollars on a high-end device with state-of-the-art ports and graphics and processing, and because "OS notifications sometimes pop up if you don't disable them", real pros buy a piece of middleware hardware that does nothing but filter out a software issue?
OS notifications and alerts are just examples of any number of things that could be displayed that are unwanted. In situations where something like that makes the setup "unusable", you have to have a hardware I/O device. There's not another option.
If the dot makes their setup unusable, then the situation prior to Monterey should also have made their setup unusable because the OS could have popped up an alert dialog at any time (or any kind of OS chrome). Using built-in I/O is absolutely fine in professional settings but not for settings where you need complete control of what's being displayed and that's precisely what they're complaining about. They never had completely control of what was being displayed. They were just OK with it because it either didn't bother them often or it wasn't a dealbreaker for whatever they were doing. If you need to know that you're only going to see what you want to see, you have to use hardware I/O.
I've never said anyone's experiences are invalid. Stop talking down to me like a child and making things up.
This seems to be the crux of the disagreement in this thread. You're equating the effect of two quite different things:
1. A pop-up that's quite intrusive / potentially embarassing, but has (say) a 1/100 chance of happening any given show, and in any case would only be there for a few seconds; the rest of the show would be unaffected
2. A small but intentionally noticeable orange dot that's there 100% of the show for every show
Yes, if you want to be a top level professional, then you can afford to have neither. But I can certainly imagine people / venues where #1 would be considered a normal cost of doing business, but #2 would not.
That said, if fixing them both is as easy and inexpensive as people in this thread seem to think, then the small "nudge" by #2 to get them to fix #1 is probably beneficial for the ecosystem overall.
You're mis-framing what I'm saying. The effect is the same. There is something on the display that is unwanted. Regardless of what that thing is, the issue at hand is that people do not want things that they didn't choose to be on the display to actually be on the display. It doesn't matter what that is. In this case, it's a small dot but it could have been a little microphone icon or a camera icon or (like Windows) an orange border around the display or literally anything else.
The fact that it didn't affect some people before is great. They were lucky that they didn't have this happen. All I'm saying is that, for years before this change in Monterey, there have been things that pop-up like this on external displays because external displays do not have the ability to prevent the OS from using a display as a display (with a couple exceptions when used with APIs for exclusivity). That's a known problem with using extended displays and it's been known for a while, regardless of the OS you're using. There's also a solution to that problem that's pretty standard in the presentation/production industry.
That being said... there are now multiple solutions for people that both don't break the intention behind this change (they're slightly technical solutions that most people won't do) and allow for app developers themselves to fix the problem (using the APIs already provided to get screen exclusivity).
It's easy to imagine a pretty wide range of people for whom a tiny theoretical risk of the OS going crazy and showing some kind of notification even with notifications disabled is acceptable, but an orange dot that's 100% deterministically guaranteed to be there isn't.
No they didn't. That's literally the entire point. Just because people don't know that or weren't affected by it regularly doesn't change that fact. People are focusing on things like notifications because that was the initial example that I used for ease of understanding but there are literally thousands of things that the OS can display, on any OS, on top of a full-screen window or by kicking the display out of full-screen. Even on Windows, Virtual DJ has has a full-screen mode and errors will kick you out of full-screen and pop-up on that display. All of that is avoidable with an I/O box.
The fact is that if you're not ok with the OS choosing what shows up on your screen, there are ways to do that and they've been industry standard for years.
Thanks for explaining, I hear what you are saying about dedicated hardware giving much more control. In the case of this dot and an external monitor / display, and until the OS is updated, that definitely sounds like a great option.
Perhaps I was misreading what you are saying; regarding:
> If the dot makes their setup unusable, then the situation prior to Monterey should also have made their setup unusable because the OS could have popped up an alert dialog at any time
It sounds like we are in disagreement around current un-usability because of (dot/notifications/etc) implying past un-usability. I get what you are saying in theory, and agree with you.
However, in my life experience, and many others in this thread, I am hearing counterexamples to this statement. The way in which I observed you responding to these statements is what invalidating _to me_. My felt experience is not "making things up".
I do not know your age and I am making no assumptions about that. The intention of my original comment was to: respectfully and kindly share the impact of how I have been receiving your comments, gain more understanding about your perspective on this issue, and offer an (obviously subjective) reflection to you about a communication pattern that I noticed in the comments here.
This sort of reflection is always coming from place of curiosity and so carries an implicit invitation to deepen into greater shared understanding and connection; I have no attachment to you receiving that reflection and I apologize if it did not land well for you. I understand these kind of things do not always translate so well in text.
I have never said that anyone was making anything up. Please do not put words into my mouth or make statements on my behalf when I have not said them.
>I apologize if it did not land well for you
This sounds like a abusive partner apologizing. "I'm sorry you made me so mad that I had to hit you"
>I am hearing counterexamples to this statement
You're not hearing counter-examples. You're hearing situations where the person, in the past, was lucky enough to not be affected by the situation they were in. That's great. It's like someone who refuses to wear their seatbelt telling someone that they never wear their seatbelt and they've never been injured even though they've driven 10000000 miles in that car. If reducing your chances of dying in a car wreck is important to you, you would have worn a seatbelt. This is like complaining that the car's seat belt chime wasn't insistent enough after you got into a wreck and are now paralyzed.
Nobody is attacking you here.
Yet, I experience your interactions here as carrying defensiveness and un-checked assumptions. That is my experience. That is different from me saying, “you are defensive.”
I am having an experience in this dialogue that feels in opposition to one of the main principles encouraged in this board, which is that of graciousness and good intent. I do not feel you have been reading my comments from that kind of orientation. Perhaps you have and I have misconstrued.
Regardless, I really don’t care enough about this issue to continue engaging with you about it like this.
Take care.
And you're right... I haven't been reading your comments from that kind of orientation because your very first comment to me claimed that I had somewhere let someone know that their experience was invalid, which I never did, or that I had somehow claimed that people's realized experiences were far-fetched, which I also never did. How can I assume graciousness and good intent from someone who didn't assume the same of me and then went out of their way to mis-frame what I have been saying? The only time I ever even suggested that something was far-fetched were the people who were claiming that something like this would affect productions like SNL or Mariah Carey on NYE because those are far-fetched suggestions.
That's fine not to continue but please don't pretend that I was the one that engaged with you "like this". You initiated the current conversation, including its tone and intent.
Take care. I hope the new year treats you well.
We don't want flamewars here. Please make your substantive points thoughtfully and without swipes in the future—regardless of how wrong other people are or you feel they are.
Btw, when discussion degenerates to the level of people arguing about what each other did or didn't say, that's a sure sign that the conversation has become tedious and uninteresting to those not involved in the spat, and that it's time to step away from the comment box.
You weren't the only person in the thread doing these things, but (from the subset I've seen), your account was behaving the worst, both qualitatively (in terms of how badly you were breaking the site guidelines) and quantitatively (in terms of how many posts you made and how much fuel you added to the flames).
Could you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the intended spirit of this site more to heart from now on? I don't want to ban you, but if this keeps happening, we'll end up having to, because it's not what this site is for and it destroys what it is for.
Can you clarify where I broke the site guidelines? I don't believe that I've personally attacked anyone but that feels like a subjective measure so I'd like to be clear on what you consider a personal attack (in this thread specifically). I don't feel like calling someone out for mischaracterizing what I'm saying or flat-out being dishonest about what I've said is a personal attack but, if it is considered that by the admins, then I'll stop doing that. If it's something else, then I'd like to be aware of it so I can check myself in the future.
I'm reading the guidelines now and will try to take the intended spirit. I don't want to get banned but I also don't want discussion to be surface-level and I get that there's a fine line there.
Sorry again. I'll do better in the future.
(I'll try to respond to your other comment later)
There's not a lot of money in the scene for most people. They use the software/hardware they have. Hiding notifications and colourful dots from the OS shouldn't really be an issue.
Why not? The internal I/O is pretty good! Except for this issue, obviously.
Portability is essential for some people, and MacBooks have pretty reliable IO.
Also notifications won't really be an issue for anyone but people using the machine both for personal and professional stuff. In the worse case, you can have different user accounts. A professional machine used for VJing or even audio recording will have zero notifications.
Also I wonder if we're talking about different scales here. I'm not talking about the 150 inch monitor, I'm talking about video art, VJing, and small scale stuff. macOS works fine for those things.
Are you a macOS user? Your other examples talk about Windows Update... the situation in macOS is a bit different, which is a lot of people doing audio/video flock to it. Not everyone needs external hardware, just a MacBook can do a lot.
Yes. macOS is my daily driver and I'm on Monterey.
All I'm saying is that, if anyone wants to say that this dot makes their use case unusable, then they have to admit that the current OS setup was always unusable for them because the OS was always able to display chrome on their displays. It may not have happened often or even in a way that they thought was "unusable" but it was able to happen. The only difference here is that they're not happy with the type of OS-level things that are displayed.
In my experience, people for whom any kind of errant display items matter use dedicated hardware devices for their I/O. If it didn't matter before because it was only windows/alerts/notifications/whatever, then that clearly doesn't make it "unusable" just "not preferred". I fully agree that there needs to be some kind of option for this on presentation displays but the people saying that SNL wouldn't have dedicated hardware for their displays is asinine.
I feel like the notifications issue you mention is bit of a red herring, because having too many things running in the background will cause problems regardless of using external gear, regardless of them showing on the screen or not. You can't rely on external gear alone for stability, the computer itself has to be stable. And the computer alone being stable is enough for 90% of people. And even if there are notifications... so what? This is people doing it for art purposes, on parties. They learn a lesson and never have to care again.
If those people are really using Steam on their computers (like you said on another comment), they surely aren't pros worried about performance, reliability, or anything of the sort that warrants a dedicated playback card, so I don't really see this use case (Steam+Blackmagic) existing at all.
Surely the default I/O is nowhere near enough for SNL or even for local broadcast, but it is good enough for a large contingent of people that don't need the same reliability that you or SNL needs. And it does works for them in practice, without notifications, and without OS chrome... except for the new orange dot, which is a nuisance.
If I could have audio inputs/outputs that were good enough for my audio work I would also prefer not using an external audio interface. I often compose on earbuds, and that's fine. For mixing I need something else. Some people might not. Who am I to judge?
Also, it's not an "or" option. Pros turn off notifications/internet, and don't leave Steam running when working, like the other poster is saying.
So it shows that there's a lot of professionals out there not following best practices (which isn't surprising to be honest, it's the case in every industry, including super critical ones…).
Maybe the orange dot will actually help these people start using best practices in the end… (note that I'm not defending Apple's move when saying so, I really hate their tendency to think there customers are wrong and because they are Apple they know better)
I really don't believe anyone running Steam on their video computer is worried enough or even serious about reliability to use a dedicated video playback card. Sure it would be nice if everyone used a dedicated card, but it's 100x more important that those people stop running Steam... unless maybe if they're pro game streamers or something.
Also, even Steam requires extra permissions on Mac to display the overlays you mention.
And no, this wasn't a Steam overlay. It was a prompt to restart the Steam app to complete some update. That does not need additional permissions.
For an incredibly small set of people who are both professional enough for this to be an issue but also not professional enough to spend a hundred bucks on a device specifically meant for this purpose.
If you're going to claim gaslighting, then maybe actually include the intricacy that you seem to have missed there.
It continues to work fine for the vast majority of people.
Let's call a spade a spade. You're blowing it way out of proportion while in reality it's an issue that impacts an incredibly small fraction of the userbase.
Your post above was also only talking about those people with mic input and video output, so it shouldn't be a problem that I did the same.
Also it's not just video, it's basically anyone "plugging their mac into shit" for professional output purposes. Could be video, could be a powerpoint, could be a software demo.
It's not about OS notifications that you forgot to disable. It's anything that the OS wants to display. Notifications and alerts were just an easy example because everyone knows what they are.
People can still plug their shit in and it'll "work fine". If they're recording audio, they'll see a little dot. If they want control of what shows up on the display, there are answer for that. Pretending like that hasn't always been the case is misguided.
The unfortunate case with a preference is that as soon as you enable such a permission folks can force users to enable that permission to use their invasive software. The orange dot exists because applications have been abusing privacy by invasively using audio and visual recording to spy on people. The solution to this problem isn't very simple and while the orange dot is causing headaches the lack of an orange dot also causes headaches.
If both options have a disadvantage, give users a choice which of the evils they prefer, for example in the pre-boot environment.
P.S. I am of course aware that it is not typical for Apple to give users a choice.
It can be empowering to users to deny bad choices - since it prevents users from being coerced by malicious software (i.e. tiktok, facebook, instagram - not like virus laden software).
That all said there is some legitimate functionality being lost with this decision.
empowering ~ deny bad choices
Just my opinion, but these linguistic contortions undermine your point.
Providing users with a decision in which there is an asymmetry and/or incentives could be setting them up for manipulation. But i think there are ways to balance the asymmetry vs. just removing the choice. A simple report showing which apps were watching/listening along with screen time could be useful, for example.
I do think there might be some other solutions but I also think the orange dot is, for almost all users, a perfectly acceptable solution - visually obvious without being obnoxious.
That is why the user should be given the choice to activate it: make it a sensible default choice in the respective settings. The experienced users who know what they do should be empowered to make a different choice if it makes sense for their workflow.
Some of the conventions I've gone to ran everything in a room off a single laptop. (I've set up such things.)
Concerts aren't much better. Only the largest events and venues have the kinds of "professional" setups you're thinking of.
Again, we're talking about "professionals" vs., at best, prosumers and consumers. Those applications are not unusable because of a small dot.
I think this change would be fine as a default, but it should be configurable by the end user.
The point is that users never had control of the output on external monitors. This situation is exactly like the situation that's happened multiple times on every OS where someone discovers a way to do something that relies on some function that they either misunderstand or are misusing (think Y2K). Just because it hasn't bitten people in the ass doesn't mean that it's a good way of doing it. People in this thread have commented surprised that Apple hasn't run into this issue during internal uses by its production teams but the reality is that Apple's production teams don't run off the built-in I/O because that's not how you run a video system you need 100% control of.
I agree that Apple should find a way to make this better (or at least hide it on secondary displays) but that's only a workaround. Today it's an orange dot. Tomorrow, it'll just be some other display indicator. The fact is that you can't (and have never been able to) control what displays from the OS on these secondary monitors. The fact that it's just now biting people in the ass is their fault, not Apple's.
Um, no, how about the built in one worked fine, didn't require me to buy a very expensive additional piece of hardware. This change took away functionality that worked before the upgrade?
> let's not start with the idea that pros are outputting directly from their computers without the right hardware.
If professional means derives income from work, you would be wrong. If pro means works for an organization with unlimited budget, you would be right.
It had the same problem that it still has. The OS can place items on the display that you don't want in the middle of a presentation/performance. The only thing that "worked fine before" is that you were ok with what the OS put there because it was rare for that to happen.
>If professional means
It means that a dot in the upper right hand corner makes the function "unusable". If that's the case, then a professional would not extend/mirror a desktop display. They make sure that they control exactly what is being displayed and you can't (and have never been able to) do that with macOS.
It's not reasonable to say it's the "same" problem when they changed it this much.
> The only thing that "worked fine before" is that you were ok with what the OS put there because it was rare for that to happen.
So rare it may have never happened. So yes, it did work fine. Are you implying that's wrong? There's no way to make a bulletproof setup, after all. Maybe with an external device you get a glitched or blank screen instead of a notification, but any hardware or software could fail. Possible chance of failure is not the same as a constant 100% chance problem, and does not excuse a constant 100% problem.
They didn't change it much. They added an indicator to the existing OS UI when a recording device is active. That's the only change that was made. As I've said elsewhere here, they could have added anything to the UI in the past and it would have had the same effect. People just didn't care because that stuff didn't affect them.
>There's no way to make a bulletproof setup, after all.
No one is saying it needs to be bulletproof. If it did and that's important to your production, you'd have backups to switch over to immediately. You're taking what I'm saying out of context and arguing straw men. If a small dot on the screen makes things "unusable" for you, then your setup is wrong. If anything that you don't want on the screen that you didn't put there is important for you, then you need to create your setup to function like that and allow for that.
All I'm saying is that there are people all over here, professionals or otherwise, who claim that a small dot on the screen is a dealbreaker for their ability to do their jobs. If that's the case, then they've been leaving their livelihoods up to chance because every OS has the ability to display things on an external display on top of a full-screen application. I'm glad some people were lucky enough for that not to happen but people whose livelihoods depend on that don't leave those things to luck.
They changed the percentage of time you have an OS overlay on the screen drastically. That's the metric I was using.
> No one is saying it needs to be bulletproof.
When you accuse people in situations where the dot matters of "leaving their livelihoods up to chance" for using normal output, you basically are saying that the notification-stopping part of the system has to be bulletproof. Swap 'bulletproof' with 'nigh-perfect, far in excess of all the other parts of the system' if you want.
And no, that's not going "by their own logic" or anything. Refusing to accept a constant dot in the corner does not mean a single notification would ruin their career.
>It means that a dot in the upper right hand corner makes the function "unusable".
I'm pretty sure professional has nothing to do with dots in the corner. There's really not much to defend about this change, and this change really reduces the utility of macbooks for many people who derive their income from work using that macbook. Hopefully, apple gets the message from users and fixes it.
It absolutely does in terms of this conversation thread since that's what the topic of discussion is.
>really not much to defend about this change
Yes, there is. It makes the vast majority of Mac users aware of when their input device is activated in situations where they may not know.
>reduces the utility of macbooks for many people who derive their income from work using that macbook
It absolutely does not. It only affects the very small portion of users for whom the dot is a dealbreaker, that have to capture audio while presenting, that are not technical enough to follow the steps to remove the dot, and that also have never cared before about the OS being able to render chrome on their work/display output.
There is ZERO reason to force the dot on every display. Restrict it to the display(s) also showing the menu bar and this becomes a non-issue. I can't believe anyone involved in this at Apple thought this was a remotely reasonable thing to do!
It didn't work perfectly fine beforehand, though. They just didn't care about how it worked before. Now, suddenly, they do.
For me, it's good, not bad. I’m sorry that for some people it means they need to do their job a little bit less careless, but the overall importance of this dot is worth it.
(I'm assuming Apple still makes an effort for this segment, but I really have no idea how they do things these days.)
EDIT: As far as I know, the best long-term answer here is for apps that present visuals full screen to "capture" the external display for exclusive use using an API (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coregraphics/14562...), but that's not super common right now.
It's not a complicated situation to grasp and it is seriously significant.
Yes, so you can go to the software vendor's "Ideas" or "Suggestions" page and ask for this, and post in forums asking people to upvote it, and hope the devs will do it. Not a great workaround. And sure, someone developed a script to get rid of this but no one is all that happy when Windows does something user-unfriendly that only a regedit hack will get rid of either.
I think they could do a better job (e.g., a simple setting in System Preferences that turns off recording notifications), but to pretend that they're doing this for no reason at all or that the orange dot is a show-stopper for a significant fraction of their user-base is just not making an argument in good faith.
Is anyone doing that...?
Well, look at the other person who replied to my comment:
"Every time this happens a small minority that is affected screams "this is interfering with my workflow" and the majority says "get over it"."
That's not technically untrue, but it fails to acknowledge that there is a tradeoff here. Again, I think Apple could be doing a better job of managing the tradeoffs, but this is not simply the majority saying "get over it". This is the majority saying "it sucks that this change interrupted your workflow, but look at the bigger picture"
It's getting safer and safer if all you want to do is watch Netflix and check your emails, but it's getting harder and harder to get your work done.
Every time this happens a small minority that is affected screams "this is interfering with my workflow" and the majority says "get over it".
As Apple keeps doing this, eventually they are going to break something you rely on.
I'm very much not surprised at saving the wrong pennies.
As repeatedly said by many people, Apple is making a tradeoff between security and special-purpose requirements. If you have a special-purpose requirement, then make sure your tools are configured for that purpose. Don't whine that the general use-case doesn't fit it!
You'll see similar whining from web devs trying to make Chrome or Firefox "hide" the chrome and go full screen programmatically. That's fundamentally incompatible with end-user security and shouldn't be allowed, ever. Asking for it won't get you anywhere. If you need full screen control, use something like Electron, not a web browser. If you need full screen projector/screen output, use a tool/software appropriate for the job.
Search for it. There are countless threads about the issue online, and last time I checked noone knew of a way to prevent it.
Imagine holding a presentation, or watching a film with someone, and suddenly your private emails fill half the screen...
So, apparently, I gotta dream bigger. Like museum AVP or concert/live performance/DJing type of live visuals. Yeah now an orange dot is a showstopper.
Live visualization takes a live music performance as input and programmatically generates a video that matches said music performance. The video might pulse along with the beat of the music. Or maybe it changes color or shape depending on the “mood” of the audio. The computer driving the visualization receives audio from the live music via a line in, which Apple treats as an active microphone.
A simple live visualization would be to display a video showing the waveform of the live audio feed.
In the Privacy menu in MacOS now, you can authorize applications to do things like use locations services and record the screen. I think it would be reasonable to include an authorization for audio recording and bypass the orange indicator. Or they could turn on the webcam green light when audio input is active?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2013/12/18...
PCs and third-party webcams are of course another matter...
It's unfortunate it causes problems for some users, hopefully a fix will be forthcoming, but I believe it's an oversight.
On OSX at least, some apps are developed by third parties whose code isn't easily scrutinized by Apple or by end users.
I think Apple's policy helps users navigate that situation pretty well. But I also can't see any good reason to prevent users from disabling that feature in a fine-grained way. E.g. per app and/or temporarily.
Apple not taken anything away. What they have done is change a default. Since defaults matter most to the least savvy users, skewing defaults toward security makes sense. Power users can apply extra skill to change the default; that’s what makes them power users.
It's just not apple's way to think users might want to do things differently.
Seems like there should be a compromise where apps that are using line input instead of the physical microphone could be exempt from the dot.
"live visuals often use mic or line input to produce sound-reactive animation and the like"
Also, does anyone knows whether the orange dot shows up when you also use an external USB audio interface? If so this is kind of stupid on the part of Apple.
The article also mentions that those apps turn on Microphone capture even when unnecessary, so it seems the dot it's doing its job, although obviously there was a massive oversight, and there should have been a special permission to disable IMO.
Got to wonder who made this decision and how many people reviewed it before it was deployed. Then again, most people aren't doing audio recording while using Keynote (or Powerpoint). Something like this could very easily fly under the radar across the entire company.
This looks like one of those problems where the edge cases are damned obvious in hindsight but aren't noticed until it hits production. Happens to everyone with a non-trivial product.
The real problem here is Apple has a history of ignoring these design mistakes for a very long time. Even when they do fix things, they have tendency to hide any mention of it. It will probably be suddenly and quietly fixed months later in some future point update.
It totally makes sense to display those privacy notifications in the desktop UI. However, when an app goes to full-screen mode, the OS shouldn't interfere with the display by default. There are plenty of szenarios, where the program needs to be able to control every single pixel of the screen.
In those cases, there are hardware solutions for this. That's not the default in any OS right now. Notifications and menu bars cannot be disabled by apps, for example. They need to be disabled from the OS level.
That is not the purpose of full screen mode. If that were the case, then notifications and menu bars would be able to be disabled by the app. They're not. They need to be disabled or muted by the user at the OS level.
But this isn't the point. So far, there were full screen modes and the OS would honor those under regular circumstances. When I run a Linux VM on a Mac, I can see the whole Linux desktop full screen. I don't want MacOS draw colored dots on top of my Linux VM. People probably don't want yellow dots on their PowerPoint presentation.
I have never ever owened a computer where an application could not controle the whole screen. Yes, there are situations, where the OS supersedes the full screen apps input, but usually they are based on user interactions or notifications (which can be disabled).
Yes you have. Every OS has chrome that cannot be disabled in full-screen. You may not regularly experience that, but it does. Imagine you're playing a video game and Windows Update throws an error. That will be displayed over your full-screen game window. It doesn't even have to be originated by the OS. As long as the OS is provided with an extended display, it has the ability to put things on top of whatever your app displays. It may not happen often but it does happen. That's the primary reason why dedicate I/O hardware exists.
That still doesn't change the fact that the point in making an app full screen is to give it control of the entire screen (or an entire virtual one of your choosing).
This, in my mind, is exactly what makes SIP brilliant as a default but optional feature. It's fantastic for 95% of Mac users, who can browse the web and write emails confident in the knowledge that their microphone is turned off. The remaining 5% need to do weird crap like run live music shows, and should take advantage of the escape hatch.
Wait, what? Does this mean that SIP is now de facto mandatory on macOS, unless you don't use any DRM-encumbered programs?
Or just have an actual physical LED nearby, maybe in the notch. They're cheap too, we decorate Christmas trees with them these days.
The obvious caveat is that a hacker w/ local access can do that themselves to hide their system foothold, which is just par-for-the-course when it comes to physically compromised machines... except I'm willing to bet they're more concerned with "jealous ex" than they are with professional hackers.
Apple is trying to add features to protect against the unprotectable instead of just acknowledging that at some point local access means game over; the only way to do that is to make it virtually unbearable to use the OS as a regular user (see UAC in Windows Vista).
I'm sure there's a way to hack the screen to make the orange dot disappear. At the least you can intercept the output buffer.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/qhbt4n/how_to_disabl...
Stuff like this is bad security design because it punts responsibility to the end user. It doesn’t actually stop anything bad from happening. If your design can’t decide whether to stop a program from capturing the mic, how do you expect my grandma to?
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/uwp/api/windows.graphics.ca...
Plus there's almost certainly some registry key you could change to turn it off on a per user basis.
What you want is a dedicated LED that is routed directly to the sound input being on at the circuit board level: like the amplifier is on, or that path is enabled by hardware or whatever. Even then, if the meaning assignment is "LED glowing = sound monitored", you cannot trust it entirely: the LED being off could mean that the LED itself is faulty. But at least you know that the mechanism cannot be tampered with by software.
it is much more valuable to have an indicator that your mic IS hot than having no indicator at all, not to mention adding an led indicator does fuck all for people who don't buy the $currentYear+1 laptop.
To easily solve both the privacy and the live visuals issue, Apple should make it so that the dot is only shown on a display of it is:
- the primary display (the one notifications appear on, since that's where the user typically checks for system status),
- the built-in display, if any,
- the display the cursor is on, or
- the display containing the frontmost window.
These are the only kinds of displays that make sense to have a persistent privacy indicator on. Anyone who's sitting at a computer is looking at at least one of these displays.
The secondary displays that artists use to show fullscreened live visuals always fit none of these criteria.
> And it does seem there could be a fix here; you already have to give applications permission to access your mic and camera, and it seems there should be some way for an app to disable the orange dot once its permissions are elevated with opt-in by the user.
MacOS already has security mechanisms meant to prevent malware from e.g. installing a rootkit into the kernel, or reading keychain passwords - one of those mechanisms could be used to prevent programs from altering whatever setting controls "show orange notification dot" (which, in a sane design, would be opt-out - or, opt-in to "disable orange notification dot) on their own.
This was a problem with webcams before the light was hardcoded to the power supply.
If that's the definition you're using - MacOS already guards against that, simply because the orange dot is already being implemented in software in a way that is difficult/impossible for ordinary programs to change (but is controllable by the OS). And, from what I understand, MacOS already has many settings that are OS-controlled - you can't do certain things without authenticating yourself to the OS, and neither can software on your behalf.
If that's not quite right, I'll have to ask you to elaborate on what scenario you're thinking of.
1. we don't want it there and they didn't ask permission or give a way to remove it
2. a tiny orange dot on a monitor will turn into a basketball sized orange ball on a big professional display
am I getting the right idea?
But.... why? Why would a little orange dot offend anyone?
Monitor outputs are for monitors - if you want an application-specific video output you can get that and it won't be a desktop so it won't have this problem.
If you mirror your desktop then yeah... you get whatever desktop UI chrome is on your desktop.
That's just how this stuff works. Sure, you could use something like a DeckLink, but the vast majority of things like this just use a monitor output.
You're not going to "gotcha!" people who have actually done this stuff.
For the use cases like the one described in the article, that distinction matters. I'm not questioning the usefulness of the orange dot, but rather the people saying the workflow of using a second monitor as output as being invalid and wrong.
TRUE: the dot BEING THERE is useless (and undesireable and bad)
FALSE: the dot makes Macs useless for live visuals
Just because something is 100% bad design, bothersome, 100% negative, and should never have been allowed to happen, does NOT mean it destroys a product entirely.
When Mini Coopers were made with the stupidest turn signals ever (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28661282) that doesn't make the car undrivable even though there's ABSOLUTELY no defense of the design.
Just because other people are feeling super aggravated about this completely stupid design decision by Apple doesn't mean it's valid to project that on me as if I'm fighting some battle.
I don't really care about this. I get it, people are upset about a totally indefensible, short-sighted design that impacts people's ability to use Macs to do presentations that will be accepted in professional contexts.
Yes, there's some sense to the hyperbole that says something is "useless" when reality is "this will not be accepted in my field of work". It's still hyperbole. Admitting that it's hyperbole doesn't mean accepting the bad design.
This is like when you crash a car. Insurance company considers it "totalled". But you can still drive it. The cost of fixing the car is more than the value of the car.
In this case, the negative effect of the orange dot outweighs all utility of the product for the use case. So it's useless in the sense that it's "worse than nothing" by some metric. It's useless in the same way that a shopping cart is useless for commuting to work. I mean, TECHNICALLY, you could commute to work in a shopping cart. But it would be worse than just not using it.
The orange dot doesn't total the presentation the way a totalled-car in a crash does, certainly not necessarily. It's NOT worse than nothing. It's not like a shopping cart for commuting to work.
The point of the replies here overall is that those things are hyperbole. It's NOT about nit-picking the language. It's "well, technically, the car will still drive in this case", it's saying that the orange dot DOES NOT ruin presentations that badly. You can ACTUALLY and PRACTICALLY present with the orange dot.
A better analogy: your nice car gets a rock through a window with a noticeable hole and huge cosmetic crack. You say "I can't drive this now! My car is useless! It's totalled!" And people are like "Dude, it's not totalled." And you say, "This is my professional car for business, I can't show up with a cracked window!" and People are like, "well, you could actually…"
It's not like the software has a bug that inverts all the colors, and people are saying "you could in fact do an inverted-color presentation, it's possible". It's JUST a little dot, and it's bad, but it's NOT as bad as the hyperbole.
I'll take you at your word that it's not that bad for you. I'll take someone else at their word that it is that bad for them. It probably depends a lot on the context.
The orange dot being unacceptable to some people and situations is never something I've doubted in the slightest.
Some people can't seem to grasp that it's perfectly consistent to say "you're being hyperbolic, but your objection is fully sound". It's as though after a crash that results in a shattered window, someone says "it's totalled!" and then if someone else says "it's NOT totalled" they take that to mean that a shattered window is no real problem.
The orange dot is totally stupid, unacceptable in many situations, the decision was atrocious, AND the language people have been using about it is hyperbolic.
Mic input is very useful for receiving timecode to keep production gear in sync.
"In our particular case, this means that this orange dot appears on the stage output, which is totally unacceptable for anyone using macOS as a professional video tool that sends video output to a video projector."
Imagine an orange dot appearing on top of every video billboard in Times Square.
> Imagine an orange dot appearing on top of every video billboard in Times Square.
I don't think I would notice or care?
Do you think none of the advertisers, or billboard owners, would notice or care?
Those are the clients paying the people that read this site to create and run their live visuals.
A 5 foot diameter orange dot on top of their ad is not what they signed off on. There is money at stake.
Whether you care or not isn't relevant.
Times Square is already blanketed in actual surveillance unrelated to live visuals on billboards.
https://www.earthcam.com/usa/newyork/timessquare/
https://worldcams.tv/united-states/new-york/times-square
https://www.mylivestreams.com/webcam/times-square-live-strea...
Potato, potato. If a billboard has a microphone attached, it's not unreasonable to put a visual tax on it. (Or the economic tax of using dedicated equipment. Nobody is running Times Square billboards off a Mac.)
Frankly, it doesn't matter if you would notice or care.
Seems unlikely that whatever's driving the billboards in time square needs to have the mic on...and that a tiny bit of postproduction is a burden on the people making said videos.
There have been many interactive billboards in Times Square. Some of them are at ground level. The article even mentions this use case: "Those applications don’t even need to be obviously using audio; live visuals often use mic or line input to produce sound-reactive animation and the like"
> tiny bit of postproduction is a burden on the people making said videos.
What postproduction are you referring to? The dot is added to the video output by the Mac, not added to the video file. You can't edit it out.
Why would anyone want to suppress a warning to the user that they are being surveilled?
Crop a 20 pixel column? Surely we have hardware that can do that in real time today...
1) Who uses macOS to run a billboard?!?
2) As far as I can tell the orange dot displays in the menu bar? Does it show in the full screen app???
https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/693969
Removing it in full screen ought to be the easy fix for Apple. By the time you've started the app and are done fiddlign with it while setting it up for production use, it should no longer be a surprise that it's using the mic.
Also, AFAIK apps don't use to autostart in full screen (might even be against design guidelines) so there should always be an opportunity to notice any spying in time.
It's absolutely not a stretch someone has a mac mini to run these.
That said, only a fool would upgrade to bleeding edge software in this usecase.
So while I can’t say if this is still the case or not, in 2012 many of the times sq billboards were being driven by macs.
So presumably you'd see a big orange dot in the right-most screen here: https://i0.wp.com/www.grimygoods.com/wp-content/uploads/2017...
Would it bother you if Star Wars had an orange dot in the corner the whole time? People want to make professional videos and live streams, and not have a constant reminder that there's a Mac somewhere involved in the video... and this has hosed people's workflows.
"I mean, jeez. They just left the mouse cursor in the middle of the screen, what's the big deal?"
100% of the computer graphics at these events came from PCs and Macs with their default video output. Some even came from the HDMI output on a Raspberry Pi.
I worked a lot with the production companies behind these shows and it seemed to be SOP to use a regular Macbook with Powerpoint to drive the displays.
Maybe at the super bowl, or the opening of the olympics, or at some major pop stars tour where everything is time coded and planned and is the same production every night, sure.
But at festivals? Clubs? Whatever NYE party you go to this year? No.
That being said, I just don't believe you. A 7-figure budget with semi trucks full of equipment that couldn't afford (or didn't think to afford) a video display device is unbelievable if you want to suggest that a small dot makes this unusable.
All of those things can be controlled though, unlike this new dot. I've had my personal laptop hooked up to one of these huge screens with a live audience of 20,000. Yes, you better be careful to close out your messaging and Gmail and everything else. But also, since it's running as an extended display and the program is running in full-screen mode, the OS generally will not show the things you mentioned anyway, in my experience.
An orange dot would not have been tolerated in this environment. "Unusable" may not be the right word, but the people who set up these kinds of things are very particular about how things look, and so is the client who is paying millions of dollars.
In the cases I've been involved with, the computers generating the displays came from the clients, though the production company also used Macs with Powerpoint for creating lower-thirds for IMAG. The client-provided computers were running a custom software application designed for displaying data on a secondary screen. I'm not even sure if Decklink can even do that as the software just expects to output to a secondary display (it does not know anything about Decklink).
Here is a picture of one such event: https://media.beam.usnews.com/7e/1e/aecd818e4128ab6759358307...
If the computers came from the clients, then the clients didn't care whether something might pop-up on accident. There's literally no way for someone on the production side to prevent that with a computer that they don't know the ins-and-outs of so it cannot be an issue so that's not the type of situation that I'm talking about.
I'm only talking about the people who are saying that this dot makes a Macbook "unusable" for the purpose of display. That's 100% not true and anyone that needs that level of precision, as a professional, uses dedicated I/O hardware to keep exactly that from happening.
I don't know what else to say. I work with people who put on live shows for 20,000+, they use PCs and Macs to drive the display WITHOUT Decklink or similar, and they would be upset if there was a persistent orange dot on the screen. If you want to split hairs about whether or not that makes the new macOS "unusable" in these situations, then fine, but in the environment I'm familiar with it would not be tolerated. They would replace the Mac device with a PC which doesn't have this issue because they would deem it unusable, even though it can technically still display images on a screen.
And despite your repeated comments on this article, it IS possible to configure a PC to not show any notifications for use in a live show, between a combination of changing OS settings, closing unneeded programs, and using the fullscreen APIs of the OS. This is something that can be done ahead of time and tested. I've written software that shows fullscreen on secondary displays on large projectors for presentation-like purposes and I have never had an OS notification pop up over the fullscreen software on a secondary display, even on other people's machines where they didn't take care to shut down programs and turn off notifications. Other commenters here seem to have similar experiences.
notifications = low probability
orange dot = 100%
The risk of an embarrassing notification got traded for the certainty of the orange dot.
For what its worth, from someone who doesn't work in this space, there's something really confusing to me:
This thread is about professionals who:
1. Are displaying visuals at venues with million dollar A/V hardware budgets.
2. For which an orange dot (or anything other than pixel-perfect outputs) is a complete showstopper.
3. Who can't afford a $100 dongle mentioned upthread to output pixel-perfect graphics from their Macs.
I'm with you right up until point #3, but I'm really struggling with the last bit. $100 doesn't even sound like "prosumer" money to me. If $100 is really a show stopper for your million dollar business, you need to charge more.
Furthermore, while I'm not an expert on these $100 dongles, my understanding is that they do not present as just another monitor (since that would defeat the purpose). Thus, you cannot just show anything on their outputs that you could otherwise show on a monitor, right? My understanding is the application has to be written specifically to output to the Decklink (but I may very well be wrong on this) - if that's the case then the $100 dongle does not fix every situation here since a lot of things that get presented may not support it.
Apparently not because the OS has always been able to do this. They're just not happy because the OS has now chosen something that they disagree with. Ignorance of the limitations is not the same as being "happy with the way it was" even if ignorance is bliss.
>written specifically to output to the Decklink
With the DeckLink specifically, yes. That's a choice made by Blackmagic, though. There are other I/O devices that let you output any window's content (like OBS does with its virtual cameras).
Sure, but this is a classic case of shifting the externalities of your industry onto the rest of the rest of the public. People who operate coal power plants were happy with generating tons and tons of smoke (but they do see the value of less smoke for the communities around the power plant).
You're asking everyone else to accept being a little less secure so that it can be easier for you to make money.
> if that's the case then the $100 dongle does not fix every situation here since a lot of things that get presented may not support it.
The most annoying part of this entire thread is how the goal posts keep shifting. The use-case that the $100 doesn't fix is one that has all of these constraints:
1. Must use audio input on the same computer that is generating the visuals (so you get an orange dot)
2. Is generating the visuals from software (that can't be modified) that can only draw to plain old monitors
3. Is doing all the above in a professional environment with XX,000 people in attendance, where not looking professional (having an orange dot) is a show-stopper.
4. The venue and/or AV professionals have no facilities to crop / letterbox / pillarbox real-time video streams
If a customer hands you a mac with a PowerPoint deck, you break condition #1. If the use-case is an artist who wrote a custom sound->viz app, you break #2. If this is a church group or a VJ in an underground club, you break condition #3. I'm having trouble imagining situation where #3 and #4 are not mutually exclusive.
If a customer hands you a laptop at the event with custom audio->viz software that doesn't work with the dongle and this is a professional event with XX,000 attendees and you don't have a way to letterbox, I believe correct answer is "We're the AV team not tech support. Your equipment is creating the orange dot. We're just projecting what you provide".
In other words, I'll stipulate that the $100 doesn't cover literally all use-cases, but the cases it doesn't cover are the nichyest of niche cases and ones where the customer has unrealistic expectations.
If you're expecting Apple to turn off a feature that is useful (and wanted) by millions of users just to help a number of users who can be counted on one hand... well, those handful of users better be buying a lot of Mac Pros.
My honest guess is that the author of the article is SUPER mad about this out of some principle-of-the-thing about how the design shouldn't do this, and they just ran with that in writing self-righteous nonsense about how this makes presentations impossible or something.
It's about as bad as having the cursor show up on the edge of a live presentation slide.
This is a news site for professional digital musicians and animators. The kind of people that are in charge of making the digital visuals behind a live performance like I described. This is not a "principle of the thing" argument, it's a "this update stops us from doing our job using Mac hardware" argument.
The hyperbole here is just so extreme.
You've never been near a show production, have you? I was involved with an amateur theater that had some projections during one of their plays. Even they were very peculiar about what was projected, where, and how.
One of the projections was a black-and white archive footage. Yes thank you, I'd love an orange dot there, it doesn't ruin it at all.
I mean, yeah, I don't want the dot there. It breaks the fourth-wall in a way. But there's something to that too. Society of the Spectacle and so on…
It's FUNNY to notice how a little orange dot is taken as such a profound threat. People could do well to reflect on the whole context a bit. Our dependency on tech and the way we depend on a few companies who force things on us, it's all serious, scary, and absurd. And this orange dot business is not the ultimate example of the problem, it's a silly one, that yes, I acknowledge is a huge problem for some people's jobs in practice.
I've been around show production stuff, and I don't respect the way everyone takes themselves so damned seriously in that world. The dadaists were onto something.
Anything that doesn't have a workaround gets thrown away. And nope, it's bot a hyperbole. I've seen lamps discarded because they couldn't be made work just right, and stage props removed entirely because they looked out of place for that particular stage.
"Something is shitty, let's laugh about it and continue regardless" is what often separates people who don't care from people who do. Unfortunately, seeing all the shit we have to put up with daily, those people that do are in the minority.
The idea that you have to connect laughing with not fixing things is evidence of being in a triggered, reactive, threatened state.
Did I ever suggest that the problem shouldn't be fixed?
People who can laugh about something are people who aren't in a state of threat. And yes, those who don't care are less likely to be threatened. But we can also find ourselves in situations where we are willing to laugh and not be so defensive and self-righteous while we still care about things.
In our outrage-driven society, that's the real minority: people who CARE and are also willing to laugh and not be in a victim mentality. And to be clear, this isn't some fundamental feature like we simply are one way or the other. These are states we can shift between, and most people are shifting all the time.
It is a special case where Macs connected to a projector are used to display live visual. The microphone is on, most likely so that the visuals can respond to sounds, and you get to show an ugly orange dot to your audience.
Macs are used a lot in the entertainment industry so it is not an insignificant problem.
The initial example of live shows (specifically the subset of which where the same device is being used for some kind of audio input and visual output) is so far the most convincing example because the orange dot is redundant there.
I see that some people above suggested a solution with an extra hardware device but even though a lot of theses creatives are using macs, they aren't especially tech literate outside of their field and have to make do with venue that can use quirky hardware with sometimes very limited time to set up their gears.
This dot is a major pita for these users.
One of the best features on Macs for the past couple of decades has been the small green light. They should add this, as hardware, to iPhones and iPads. Software dots on the status bar indicate to me that the OS people view it as a key issue but the hardware folk haven't caught up to the issue yet.
Break the cycle, stop buying Apple!
So basically, what this guy is saying is that sometimes he wants to show an app that is listening to the audience, but without letting his audience know that they could be recorded by his application.
Here's the crux of his issue.
"In the interest of security and privacy, Apple on macOS Monterey has added a prominent orange dot to display outputs when audio capture is active. That renders their machines unusable for live visual performance, though, since it’s also shown on external displays. Dear macOS team – we urgently need a fix here.
The basic idea here is sound – to avoid software hijacking your camera and audio input and spying on you, essentially, there’s an orange dot to let you know recording is active. But this essentially makes the Mac unusable for live visuals, since it impacts external projectors and LED walls and the like. (Those applications don’t even need to be obviously using audio; live visuals often use mic or line input to produce sound-reactive animation and the like."
Here's where I feel he's being disingenuous:
"Those applications don’t even need to be obviously using audio; live visuals often use mic or line input to produce sound-reactive animation and the like."
So they're not using audio, but may be using the microphone or line input to access sound for "reasons". That's called "using audio". He's trying to draw a distinction that doesn't exist. He wants to make it clear he's using audio in a non-privacy-violating way. And I believe that he is. I do believe he's a good-faith actor who is just trying to use audio input to enhance certain presentations.
However, it has the same behavior as people who do not act in good faith. This is a prime example of dipshits ruining it for everyone. There can't really be an exception because then that exception just gets used by the bad faith actors in the space.
To solve his problem what he really needs is a monitor/projector that doesn't show the top however many pixels required by the menu bar. In a very amateur way, this would be accomplished with a piece of electrical tape over the monitor. For a projector, there could possible be a special lens cap that cuts off the required area. Like a matte lens.
2- The dot appears on secondary displays running full screen video: there is no menu bar to crop off. You can only crop off part of the visuals, or your visuals have to be lower resolution to produce artificial dead area to crop.
3- Apple has never given any indication that they intend to add indicators that someone else is being recorded by my computer. The indicators are for the computer owner, to indicate that software may be recording the owner without their knowledge. The parties are all different than you're supposing.
I promise you that the people who do those visuals for SNL (and every other wacky scenario people are coming up with) are not mirroring or extending their desktops. They're using dedicated video hardware for this exact reason.
2 - The dot essentially forces a bar. It's not an overlay on the application's graphics. This is what is shown in the images. So there is something to crop off.
Not to mention, if it is known, it can be planned around. This is exactly what television has been doing for years. There are scan lines that don't get shown on screens despite being broadcast.
3 - This is almost as disingenuous as the article. The dot is there to inform the user of the device/screen that they could be recorded. The audience during a performance would qualify as a user in this case. It's basically an indicator saying, "if you can see this, it's possible the device showing this is recording your audio". That is completely relevant for an audience. If you think it's not, then why is it relevant for anyone else. There are thousands of excuses one can use to justify hiding this information from anybody. Once you are potentially violating my privacy, it is relevant to me.
That’s a funny word for “extremely minor visual artifact.”
Yes, it would obviously be much more "valid engineering" to have each of these devices have their own custom, invariably much buggier and crappier, OS.
Instead, I prefer to use devices with a hardware kill switch for camera and microphone, e.g., https://puri.sm/products/librem-14.
Power users should be able to disable anything.
why?