11 ms·

I don’t understand what the problem is. Why does it matter whether a little orange dot is there or not.

by togaen 5y ago

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jaywalk 5y ago
The orange dot will appear on the live output, which is fed to an LED video wall/projector/etc. on or near a stage. Completely unacceptable, and makes Macs entirely useless for live visuals.
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  > Completely unacceptable But.... why? Why would a little orange dot offend anyone?
  - jaywalk 5y ago
    Because it's not part of the visuals, which should be the only thing on the output. Maybe it's because I've actually run systems for this exact purpose, but I'm kind of surprised at how difficult this seems to be for some to grasp.
    - chrisseaton 5y ago
      But I don't understand why they're mirroring their desktop to some kind of visual display system? Wouldn't they be using something like a DeckLink for this use-case? 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.
      - ehutch79 5y ago
        Because most of these displays look like monitors to your system. Using the existing rendering pipelines to a full screen monitor is far easier, and less expensive then custom hardware just to move pixels that the built in graphics card is more than capable of
        chrisseaton 5y ago
        Ok so it's a quick hack for video output but they're going to run into problems like this. And for example any notifications, system updates, Launchpad, whatever, would also appear. That's how you end up with goofy things like a sign with a Windows 'need to update now' message. If they were doing it properly with a production video output they wouldn't have this problem.
        jaywalk 5y ago
        You can call it a "quick hack" if you'd like, but I can assure you that all of the potential pitfalls you mention are taken into account by the people who setup and run these systems. You're not going to "gotcha!" people who have actually done this stuff.
      - jaywalk 5y ago
        They're not mirroring their desktop. It's a secondary display running a full screen application. 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.
      - dkonofalski 5y ago
        Thank you! It's crazy to me that anyone that would consider themselves a professional would mirror their desktop for the use cases these people claim to be using. "Mariah Carey playing in front of millions on NYE"? Gimme a break. No one is mirroring the desktop from their Macbook for that performance.
        ratww 5y ago
        Nobody is mirroring their desktop...
        chrisseaton 5y ago
        That's how the orange dot is appearing - it's a UI element from the interactive user-interface of macOS, but it's appearing on a video out because they're re-using a monitor signal designed for mirroring or extending you desktop.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        ratww 5y ago
        That might be pedantic, sure, but the point is that extending is not mirroring. 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.
        dkonofalski 5y ago
        You know what I mean and the distinction is meaningless. No one doing a show as big as that is doing it without the hardware necessary to make sure that they can control 100% of the output path.
  - egypturnash 5y ago
    Artists expect a blank canvas, with nothing there they have not put there.
  - the_fury 5y ago
    Because if I had wanted a little orange dot to be shown to everyone during my performance, I would have put it there.
- quadrangle 5y ago
  You seem to be confusing two things (well, really just you're being hyperbolic): 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28661282) that doesn't make the car undrivable even though there's ABSOLUTELY no defense of the design.
  - jaywalk 5y ago
    The dot absolutely makes Macs useless for live visuals. Nobody worth a damn would ever use a system that required an orange dot to appear on the live output.
    - quadrangle 5y ago
      You can use them for live visuals. You WON'T (and I don't blame you), but you CAN. "Absolutely useless" obviously is intended to be "I'm super mad about this" rather than literally true.
      - nullandvoid 5y ago
        You're picking a really odd hill to die on. Is it that hard to imagine that having random imagery (orange dot) showing on your live work (which a client has paid $$$ for) is a complete no-go for professionals (if you ever want to get hired again)?
        quadrangle 5y ago
        Just mildly objecting to the strength of someone's hyperbole is life-threatening? 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.
- buildbuildbuild 5y ago
  My temporary fix has been to use an expensive hardware scaler to crop the output when I run into this. You’d think Apple would have plenty of production experts beta testing, I’m sure this will eventually affect their own live events. Mic input is very useful for receiving timecode to keep production gear in sync.
  - jaywalk 5y ago
    Yeah, I considered that when I was reading the article. If your content can still look alright being scaled, that'll work. There is definitely some content that won't be quite so forgiving, though.
    - buildbuildbuild 5y ago
      You’re right. To clarify I’m blacking out the top X pixels to hide the dot, not scaling.
  - modeless 5y ago
    There's a built in accessibility zoom feature in macos, can it also crop out the dot?
dangrossman 5y ago
Did you read the article? "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.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- quadrangle 5y ago
  Gosh, everyone who was about to be convinced to go buy a Big Mac will lose their appetite! /s
- bryan0 5y ago
  I'm sure Parent read the article, but the question is why is this a big deal? For someone not in the live visual space, it's not immediately clear that an orange dot in the corner is "totally unacceptable". > Imagine an orange dot appearing on top of every video billboard in Times Square. I don't think I would notice or care?
  - dangrossman 5y ago
    > 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.
    - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
      As a New Yorker, I’d love to have that sort of visual feedback on the surveillance of Times Square, a public space. And whether I care is quite relevant.
      - 5y ago
khazhoux 5y ago
I think the context is if you are using Mac to generate visuals that get projected on a screen during performances. I guess now you wind up with an orange dot in top right corner. 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/2017/12/thomyorke-6_preview-e1513280616534.jpg https://i0.wp.com/www.grimygoods.com/wp-content/uploads/2017...
olyjohn 5y ago
Looks unprofessional IMO if you were watching a live stream, and there was a permanent orange dot on your video. People may be screen capturing using an external output... 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.
eropple 5y ago
Because when you are running video out to a 150" LED wall, that orange dot is a very large dot. And even were it not, you are not building your presentational elements around "having some orange dot on screen". "I mean, jeez. They just left the mouse cursor in the middle of the screen, what's the big deal?"
- quadrangle 5y ago
  The mouse cursor on the side of the screen is stupid indeed. But it doesn't make presentations impossible. I think all the objections here are objecting to hyperbole rather than defending the dot.
  - ehutch79 5y ago
    Not presentations, Think big musicians/festivals.
    - quadrangle 5y ago
      Yeah, I get it. Not gonna be accepted in practice. Could be accepted though, it's not literally useless. Being not as bad as literally-useless doesn't mean anything about the situation is good.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- sixothree 5y ago
  How are you going to a 150" LED wall and not processing the output? I think that's the part I don't get.
  - kfarr 5y ago
    Well they may be processing the output but the raw input has an orange dot so at the very least this is additional labor to configure additional custom processing.
kinghtown 5y ago
Visually distracting.. a loss of control in design.. a reminder of Apple when you are displaying unrelated content.. A live show doesn’t need the visual art to have an orange dot. Im surprised you can’t see how that could matter.
quadrangle 5y ago
Everyone focuses on the dot and can no longer listen to the content of the presentation? /s 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.
- dangrossman 5y ago
  "Live presentation" like "the visuals on the video wall behind Mariah Carey while she sings live for 10 million people on TV", not "live presentation" like "your PowerPoint presentation to your 4 coworkers". 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.
  - quadrangle 5y ago
    Yeah, I get it. Apple's design is stupid and shouldn't have happened. But obviously Mariah Carey CAN sing on TV with a little orange dot. Obviously nobody wants that, and in practice nobody will accept it. But it remains completely possible and would not completely destroy her performance. The hyperbole here is just so extreme.
    - dangrossman 5y ago
      If in practice nobody will accept it, then there's nothing hyperbolic about the article.
    - dmitriid 5y ago
      > 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.
rainbowzootsuit 5y ago
My interpretation from the article is that you might imagine the external display output is a video wall for a concert with a full screen visual show being synced to music or something, thus the simultaneous audio capture going on.
GuB-42 5y ago
For the same reason why you may not want to see an orange dot when you watch a movie in a theater and also the reason art galleries don't put orange dots in front of artworks. 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.
- kube-system 5y ago
  From purely a privacy perspective, that is an interesting comparison. Some art installations that record their observers do have disclaimers that recording is happening, sometimes by law.
- treesprite82 5y ago
  For a lot of the examples being given in this thread, like billboards and movies, I'd actually welcome an orange dot notifying me that audio is being recorded - since that's not an expectation I'd otherwise have. Though this probably isn't what Apple are trying to do, and would need to be enforced to prevent circumvention. 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.
  - simonh 5y ago
    It’s not being recorded, the Audi input is being used to generate reactive video responsive to the audio track.
    - treesprite82 5y ago
      I note "some kind of audio input" for that case. Notifying of audio-recording billboards/etc. is a separate case signalled by the dot (which I think could theoretically be a positive, but isn't practically achieved with just this change).
david422 5y ago
If you went to the website www.apple.com and there was an orange dot in the corner, how long do you think it would be before Apple changed it?
fold3 5y ago
It mostly concern artists that present video such as for art exhibition or VJ live shows I believe. Any unintended visuals would kill the immersion, the aesthetics and looks unprofessional. Like leaving the mouse cursor visible or UI elements. 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.

I don’t understand what the problem is. Why does it matter whether a little orange dot is there or not.

by togaen 5y ago

I don’t understand what the problem is. Why does it matter whether a little orange dot is there or not.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

jaywalk 5y ago

The orange dot will appear on the live output, which is fed to an LED video wall/projector/etc. on or near a stage. Completely unacceptable, and makes Macs entirely useless for live visuals.

chrisseaton 5y ago
> Completely unacceptable But.... why? Why would a little orange dot offend anyone?
- jaywalk 5y ago
  Because it's not part of the visuals, which should be the only thing on the output. Maybe it's because I've actually run systems for this exact purpose, but I'm kind of surprised at how difficult this seems to be for some to grasp.
  - chrisseaton 5y ago
    But I don't understand why they're mirroring their desktop to some kind of visual display system? Wouldn't they be using something like a DeckLink for this use-case? 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.
    - ehutch79 5y ago
      Because most of these displays look like monitors to your system. Using the existing rendering pipelines to a full screen monitor is far easier, and less expensive then custom hardware just to move pixels that the built in graphics card is more than capable of
      - chrisseaton 5y ago
        Ok so it's a quick hack for video output but they're going to run into problems like this. And for example any notifications, system updates, Launchpad, whatever, would also appear. That's how you end up with goofy things like a sign with a Windows 'need to update now' message. If they were doing it properly with a production video output they wouldn't have this problem.
        jaywalk 5y ago
        You can call it a "quick hack" if you'd like, but I can assure you that all of the potential pitfalls you mention are taken into account by the people who setup and run these systems. You're not going to "gotcha!" people who have actually done this stuff.
    - jaywalk 5y ago
      They're not mirroring their desktop. It's a secondary display running a full screen application. 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.
    - dkonofalski 5y ago
      Thank you! It's crazy to me that anyone that would consider themselves a professional would mirror their desktop for the use cases these people claim to be using. "Mariah Carey playing in front of millions on NYE"? Gimme a break. No one is mirroring the desktop from their Macbook for that performance.
      - ratww 5y ago
        Nobody is mirroring their desktop...
        chrisseaton 5y ago
        That's how the orange dot is appearing - it's a UI element from the interactive user-interface of macOS, but it's appearing on a video out because they're re-using a monitor signal designed for mirroring or extending you desktop.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        ratww 5y ago
        That might be pedantic, sure, but the point is that extending is not mirroring. 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.
        dkonofalski 5y ago
        You know what I mean and the distinction is meaningless. No one doing a show as big as that is doing it without the hardware necessary to make sure that they can control 100% of the output path.
- egypturnash 5y ago
  Artists expect a blank canvas, with nothing there they have not put there.
- the_fury 5y ago
  Because if I had wanted a little orange dot to be shown to everyone during my performance, I would have put it there.
quadrangle 5y ago
You seem to be confusing two things (well, really just you're being hyperbolic): 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28661282) that doesn't make the car undrivable even though there's ABSOLUTELY no defense of the design.
- jaywalk 5y ago
  The dot absolutely makes Macs useless for live visuals. Nobody worth a damn would ever use a system that required an orange dot to appear on the live output.
  - quadrangle 5y ago
    You can use them for live visuals. You WON'T (and I don't blame you), but you CAN. "Absolutely useless" obviously is intended to be "I'm super mad about this" rather than literally true.
    - nullandvoid 5y ago
      You're picking a really odd hill to die on. Is it that hard to imagine that having random imagery (orange dot) showing on your live work (which a client has paid $$$ for) is a complete no-go for professionals (if you ever want to get hired again)?
      - quadrangle 5y ago
        Just mildly objecting to the strength of someone's hyperbole is life-threatening? 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.
buildbuildbuild 5y ago
My temporary fix has been to use an expensive hardware scaler to crop the output when I run into this. You’d think Apple would have plenty of production experts beta testing, I’m sure this will eventually affect their own live events. Mic input is very useful for receiving timecode to keep production gear in sync.
- jaywalk 5y ago
  Yeah, I considered that when I was reading the article. If your content can still look alright being scaled, that'll work. There is definitely some content that won't be quite so forgiving, though.
  - buildbuildbuild 5y ago
    You’re right. To clarify I’m blacking out the top X pixels to hide the dot, not scaling.
- modeless 5y ago
  There's a built in accessibility zoom feature in macos, can it also crop out the dot?

dangrossman 5y ago

Did you read the article? "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.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
quadrangle 5y ago
Gosh, everyone who was about to be convinced to go buy a Big Mac will lose their appetite! /s
bryan0 5y ago
I'm sure Parent read the article, but the question is why is this a big deal? For someone not in the live visual space, it's not immediately clear that an orange dot in the corner is "totally unacceptable". > Imagine an orange dot appearing on top of every video billboard in Times Square. I don't think I would notice or care?
- dangrossman 5y ago
  > 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.
  - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
    As a New Yorker, I’d love to have that sort of visual feedback on the surveillance of Times Square, a public space. And whether I care is quite relevant.
    - 5y ago

khazhoux 5y ago

I think the context is if you are using Mac to generate visuals that get projected on a screen during performances. I guess now you wind up with an orange dot in top right corner. 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/2017/12/thomyorke-6_preview-e1513280616534.jpg https://i0.wp.com/www.grimygoods.com/wp-content/uploads/2017...

olyjohn 5y ago

Looks unprofessional IMO if you were watching a live stream, and there was a permanent orange dot on your video. People may be screen capturing using an external output... 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.

eropple 5y ago

Because when you are running video out to a 150" LED wall, that orange dot is a very large dot. And even were it not, you are not building your presentational elements around "having some orange dot on screen". "I mean, jeez. They just left the mouse cursor in the middle of the screen, what's the big deal?"

quadrangle 5y ago
The mouse cursor on the side of the screen is stupid indeed. But it doesn't make presentations impossible. I think all the objections here are objecting to hyperbole rather than defending the dot.
- ehutch79 5y ago
  Not presentations, Think big musicians/festivals.
  - quadrangle 5y ago
    Yeah, I get it. Not gonna be accepted in practice. Could be accepted though, it's not literally useless. Being not as bad as literally-useless doesn't mean anything about the situation is good.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
sixothree 5y ago
How are you going to a 150" LED wall and not processing the output? I think that's the part I don't get.
- kfarr 5y ago
  Well they may be processing the output but the raw input has an orange dot so at the very least this is additional labor to configure additional custom processing.

kinghtown 5y ago

Visually distracting.. a loss of control in design.. a reminder of Apple when you are displaying unrelated content.. A live show doesn’t need the visual art to have an orange dot. Im surprised you can’t see how that could matter.

quadrangle 5y ago

Everyone focuses on the dot and can no longer listen to the content of the presentation? /s 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.

dangrossman 5y ago
"Live presentation" like "the visuals on the video wall behind Mariah Carey while she sings live for 10 million people on TV", not "live presentation" like "your PowerPoint presentation to your 4 coworkers". 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.
- quadrangle 5y ago
  Yeah, I get it. Apple's design is stupid and shouldn't have happened. But obviously Mariah Carey CAN sing on TV with a little orange dot. Obviously nobody wants that, and in practice nobody will accept it. But it remains completely possible and would not completely destroy her performance. The hyperbole here is just so extreme.
  - dangrossman 5y ago
    If in practice nobody will accept it, then there's nothing hyperbolic about the article.
  - dmitriid 5y ago
    > 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.

rainbowzootsuit 5y ago

My interpretation from the article is that you might imagine the external display output is a video wall for a concert with a full screen visual show being synced to music or something, thus the simultaneous audio capture going on.

GuB-42 5y ago

For the same reason why you may not want to see an orange dot when you watch a movie in a theater and also the reason art galleries don't put orange dots in front of artworks. 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.

kube-system 5y ago
From purely a privacy perspective, that is an interesting comparison. Some art installations that record their observers do have disclaimers that recording is happening, sometimes by law.
treesprite82 5y ago
For a lot of the examples being given in this thread, like billboards and movies, I'd actually welcome an orange dot notifying me that audio is being recorded - since that's not an expectation I'd otherwise have. Though this probably isn't what Apple are trying to do, and would need to be enforced to prevent circumvention. 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.
- simonh 5y ago
  It’s not being recorded, the Audi input is being used to generate reactive video responsive to the audio track.
  - treesprite82 5y ago
    I note "some kind of audio input" for that case. Notifying of audio-recording billboards/etc. is a separate case signalled by the dot (which I think could theoretically be a positive, but isn't practically achieved with just this change).

david422 5y ago

If you went to the website www.apple.com and there was an orange dot in the corner, how long do you think it would be before Apple changed it?

fold3 5y ago

It mostly concern artists that present video such as for art exhibition or VJ live shows I believe. Any unintended visuals would kill the immersion, the aesthetics and looks unprofessional. Like leaving the mouse cursor visible or UI elements. 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.