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Weeknote!
⏳ The internet’s time machine is starting to run out of time itself
🤮 Liquid Glass is still awful
💻 MacBook Air M5 reviewed
👾 Neo Geo is back. Again. And it’s still spendy.
🧱 Loads and loads of Lego
I don’t think iOS is overall “simpler” than macOS. Some things are easier on iOS, others more difficult or even impossible.
Does anyone claim that typing is simpler on iOS? That would be absurd! The form factor of a phone and a desktop are so drastically different, it often makes no sense to compare simplicity directly. A relatively tiny phone requires many design compromises.
In some ways, iPhone is arbitrarily limited, and that can make life more difficult. Need to solve a problem? Too bad!
I’ve seen a few takes of late that Liquid Glass is actually Pretty Good Now™, or that upgrade laggards are scared that Apple will merge its operating systems.
Most of my devices remain on pre-26 systems because of Liquid Glass. In part, that’s about usability. But mostly, it’s still about accessibility.
At best, Liquid Glass is poor, even with accessibility controls turned on. There are so many holes, and it’s clear Apple won’t deal with them, since we’re now on the road to the 27 systems.
I mean, I was irritated enough by rounded window corners when taking screenshots of emulators and having to paint back in ‘missing’ pixels. But in Sequoia, the windows rarely interrupted by work.
In macOS 26, the corners are so ludicrously oversized that there is an impact on information provision and density, along with causing distraction in multi-window setups because there are loads of gaps.
Plus it also makes the system look like My First Operating System.
RE: https://mastodon.social/@tuomas_h/116397694769738857
100% agree. I *need* accessibility on for my general work, due to motion sensitivity issues. But Reduce Transparency (and, to a lesser extent, Reduce Motion) is now so flawed that my main work Mac is still on Sequoia. I don’t recall ever having had a main Mac lag so much.
But also in those grabs, those absurd drop shadows that make the buttons the most visually prominent thing on the screen, along with the insanely massive window corners, are abysmal design.
RE: https://mastodon.social/@_Davidsmith/116398266142227490
A quick reminder to developers, though: framed shots look cool, but many publications require standard grabs at full-size, and so please include those in your press kits. If you don’t offer any, that reduces coverage opportunities.
(Obvs, do both if you like. But don’t just put grabs in a frame, reduce their size, whack them online as JPEGs, and leave it at that.)
I like retro handhelds. I own far too many retro handhelds. But the latest Anbernic feels firmly in the solution looking for a problem camp. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuWkJqD05l8
(Lack of a headphone port on this one also feels like a major misstep to me.)
Jeff Johnson