The New York Times has frame-by-frame analysis, from three angles, of the murder of 37-year-old Renee Good in Minneapolis yesterday. She was shot to death by a still-unnamed mask-wearing ICE agent Jonathan Ross, with what was obviously no justification. The shooting is, just...
This 2021 post from Jason Fried is a good chaser to his “The Big Regression” this week (which I linked to yesterday):
Much of the tension in product development and interface design
comes from trying to balance the obvious, the easy, and the
possible. Figuring out which ...
Howard Oakley, writing at The Eclectic Light Company
macOS Tahoe’s visual interface:
Fits largely rectangular contents into windows with excessively
rounded corners.
Enlarges controls without any functional benefit.
Results in app icons being more uniform, thus less
di...
Jim Nielsen:
It’s extra noise to me. It’s not that I think menu items should
never have icons. I think they can be incredibly useful (more on
that below). It’s more that I don’t like the idea of “give each
menu item an icon” being the default approach.
This posture lend...
Jason Fried:
My folks are in town visiting us for a couple months so we rented
them a house nearby.
It’s new construction. No one has lived in it yet. It’s amped up
with state of the art systems. You know, the ones with
touchscreens of various sizes, IoT appliances, and...
Pickle CEO Daniel Park posted on Twitter/X, attempting to rebut the analysis from Matthew Dowd I linked to over the weekend pointing out the ways that Pickle’s AR glasses, for which they’re accepting $800 pre-orders, look like a scam. Park’s rebuttal, in my opinion, boils do...
This essay from UI critic Nikita Prokopov is just devastatingly good. If you’ve looked at MacOS 26 Tahoe, you’re surely appalled by the new UI guideline that recommends putting icons next to every single menu item. Prokopov argues — with copious screenshot illustrations ever...
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What a great site (and Bluesky account) this is. Just what it says on the tin: all the scenarios for how the NFL playoff seedings can shake out, presented very plainly but clearly. The old-school World Wide Web still has a beating heart.
Matthew Dowd, in a long, devastatingly careful post on Twitter/X:
If they’re suggesting their waveguide displays are bright enough
and vibrant enough to see clearly in direct sunlight, that would
be yet another innovation they’ve discovered that every other
player in the...
My thanks to Listen Later for sponsoring this week at DF. Listen Later is a super simple, super useful service that turns articles into podcast episodes. When you sign up, you get a custom email address to send articles to; every article you forward to your Listen Later addr...
Two years ago, I linked to the then-new Clicks keyboard case — an iPhone case with a built-in BlackBerry-style hardware keyboard jutting out from the bottom. I wrote then:
I don’t know how much I’ll wind up using it but it looks fun,
useful, and clever — and I’m just a s...
Matthew Walther, in an opinion piece last week for The New York Times (gift link):
MAGA’s internal culture has always rewarded theatrical
confrontation over achievement. Boorishness commands attention,
and boors mistake attention for leverage. Pseudo-martyrdom becomes
an...
After posting a link to the Computer History Museum’s release of the Photoshop 1.0 source code last week, I spent some time paging through the original Photoshop manuals. I found a screenshot of the dialog box where you entered your serial number, and posted it to Mastodon, ...
Okay, now you’re getting upset. You’re getting upset despite the
fact that we have strict rules against getting upset at this Hertz
location. But tell me, honestly, when you reserved a rental car
through Hertz, you thought… what? That we were going to set aside
a special little car just for you? Seriously? Oh my god.
Ruffin Prevost, writing at The New York Times:
As everyone filed out, I repeated, in English, some of the
priest’s comments to my guide, Keiko Hatada, who taught English
for 30 years and has led custom tours of Tokyo for the past
decade. I wanted to make sure I had under...
Bobby Allyn, reporting three weeks ago for NPR:
The developer of ICEBlock, an iPhone app that anonymously tracks
the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, has
sued the Trump administration for free speech violations after
Apple removed the service from ...
Randy Walters wrote a lovely little story, “Christiane’s Gift”, originally published back in 2012, about a visit to a Frankfurt museum hosting an exhibit from Stanley Kubrick’s personal archives in 2004. I toured the same exhibit at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Fran...
Some follow-up on the looks-like-AI-slop “painting” Tim Cook posted on Twitter/X on Christmas Eve to promote the Pluribus season finale. Slashdot contacted the credited artist, Keith Thomson, and quoted this interaction with him:
Slashdot: I just wanted to confirm that t...
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My thanks to Copilot Money for sponsoring last week at DF. Copilot is a personal finance app for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and they’ve always deeply believed in the value of embracing the design idioms and technical features of truly native apps for Apple platforms. Apple h...
Major update to Rogue Amoeba’s essential audio utility for the Mac. I’ve written about versions 5 and 4 previously, and everything I wrote then remains true. SoundSource remains the system-wide audio menu item that ought to be built into MacOS, giving you easy, intuitive con...
The whole illustration is just weird looking, for one thing. As for sloppy details, the tree is in soft focus but somehow has a crisp edge, the carton is labeled both “Whole Milk” and “Lowfat Milk”, and the “Cow Fun Puzzle” maze is just goofily wrong. (I can’t recall ever se...
Special guest Quinn Nelson returns for a two-topic holiday spectacular: the iPad in the wake of iPadOS 26, and Apple’s executive changes as Tim Cook seemingly nears the end of his time as CEO.
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Smart, fair video from Quinn Nelson on the gap that remains between iPadOS 26 and desktop OSes. I think it’s right that there is a gap there. Apple has the Macintosh, the best desktop/workstation platform in the industry. So whatever the ideal is for iPadOS, it ought to fall short of MacOS in terms of technical capabilities, and instead offer a degree of simplicity and can’t-screw-it-up-edness that the Mac can’t match. But, some of the limitations that remain in iPadOS are just frustrating. iPadOS 26 is a huge leap forward, and I think sets the stage for Apple to address those limitations.
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