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...

The Financial Times has a nice illustrated guide to the leadership team at Twitter/X, where things are going about as you’d expect.

Link: ft.com/content/ad94db4c-95a0-4c65-bd8d-3b43e1251091…

Welcome to Philadelphia, Donnie Baseball.

Link: nytimes.com/athletic/6942357/2026/01/05/don-mattingly-hired…

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.

Link: nflplayoffscenarios.com/

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...

A look back at Apple’s 2025, with special guest Rene Ritchie.

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Link: daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2025/12/31/ep-438

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, ...

Jason Pargin is — well, to my tastes — a master of the TikTok video format. This one is so good, and ends with a mic-drop closing line.

Link: knowyourmeme.com/videos/433740-just-coffee-black

Emily Delaney, at McSweeney’s:

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.

(Via Kottke.)

Link: mcsweeneys.net/articles/im-in-charge-at-this-hertz-location…

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...

Terrific interaction design from The New York Times. Not so terrific interior design from the president.

Link: nytimes.com/interactive/2025/12/23/us/trump-white-house…

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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Link: daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2025/12/24/ep-437

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.

Link: youtube.com/watch?v=bnYLpA5kAbo

Another great video from Quinn Nelson. If your dumb cousin who knows you’re an Apple nerd approaches you on Christmas and says “Hey what’s going on at Apple, Bloomberg says it’s rats leaving a sinking ship over there?” and you don’t feel like explaining, just tell him to watch this video. Just the perfect explanation.

Link: youtube.com/watch?v=e1E-yfcKdUw

From a 2023 report at The Verge: Sony highly confidential information about its PlayStation business has just been revealed by mistake. As part of the FTC v. Microsoft hearing, Sony supplied a document from PlayStation chief Jim Ryan that includes redacted details on the...