Mastodawn

samir, the brown sheep

@samir@functional.computer

1.3K Followers

1,010 Following

9.5K Posts

Trying very hard to avoid computers, and failing miserably.

A 30-something British-born coconut Indian living in Zürich, Switzerland. I speak English, and enough Hochdeutsch to order a pizza.

Occasional, inadvertent arsehole. If observed, please call me out.

Fascists, racists, Zionists, TERFs, homophobes, and other bigots can fuck right off.

Admin and sole user of this self-hosted instance.

This profile is searchable.

pronouns	he/him; they/them
location	Zürich, Switzerland
blog	https://functional.computer/

samir, the brown sheep 10h ago

David Griffith 10h ago

Lasagna for dinner, and wife decided she didn't want carbs, so she's eaten everything except the pasta.

It lies there, bereft of life, like it's been drained by some bolognese vampire.

Nosferagu.

samir, the brown sheep 10h ago

Mrs Beanbag 10h ago

i think i've just discovered the most useless data visualisation ever. US GDP as a bar chart. It's just one massive bar for a single year. And as you change the year with the slider at the bottom, the bar doesn't change size, it just changes the scale of the graph.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?end=2024&locations=US&start=2024&view=bar

World Bank Open Data

Free and open access to global development data

World Bank Open Data

samir, the brown sheep 12h ago

Soatok Dreamseeker 13h ago

Checklists Are The Thief Of Joy

I have never seen security and privacy checklists used for any other purpose but deception. After pondering this observation, I'm left seriously doubting if comparison checklists have any valid use case except to manipulate the unsuspecting. But before we get into that, I'd like to share why we're talking about this today. Recently, another person beat me to the punch of implementing MLS (RFC 9420) in TypeScript.

http://soatok.blog/2025/07/07/checklists-are-the-thief-of-joy/

Checklists Are The Thief Of Joy - Dhole Moments

I have never seen security and privacy checklists used for any other purpose but deception. After pondering this observation, I’m left seriously doubting if comparison checklists have any val…

Dhole Moments

samir, the brown sheep 12h ago

How many blocks/wedges of cheese are too many blocks/wedges?

samir, the brown sheep 12h ago

Souvlaki Space Station 13h ago

Jokes aside, there's a serious life hack here, especially for folks with ADHD and similar. When you're constantly multi-track drifting in your head, Minesweeper is a perfect anchor if you're struggling to focus on a lecture, I really recommend it

samir, the brown sheep 14h ago

Daniel Terhorst-North 14h ago

What would you use for a mini database, local, on a Mac, where you might want name, date, a few custom (dropdown?) fields, notes in a text box or two, that kind of thing? Something that you might have made an Access database form for back in the day? Preferably Markdown for the notes.

Like a hipster CMS, I feel like there is something obvious I'm not thinking of.

[EDIT]: A NotePlan folder with Cards view and properties-as-fields is not bad at all!

samir, the brown sheep 14h ago

Ein Freund dreht einen Doku über ausländische Arbeiter in Zürich, die keine Wohnung finden.

Kennst du jemand, der an einer Teilnahme interessiert sein könnte?

Weitere Informationen findest du im Flyer.

samir, the brown sheep 18h ago

samir, the brown sheep 1d ago

I decided I was missing something on Unix.
https://codeberg.org/ooble/defrag.exe

samir, the brown sheep 1d ago

Now there is literally no excuse not to move to Linux from Windows. We even got defrag.exe. What else do you need?

samir, the brown sheep 1d ago

I really miss the Windows Disk Defragmenter. It was so soothing.

So I made my own. And you can run this one as many times as you like; it’ll generate you a new (fake) file system to defragment every time.

Enjoy, folks.

×

Louie Mantia, Jr.Jun 28

You know, I could write a whole blog post about this—and I might—but I think we need to start addressing the very likely possibility that the *entire thesis* that “UI should get out of the way” and “apps should focus on content” is wrong.

Apps aren’t just for looking at photos or videos. They’re for navigating through these things, organizing them, editing them. The tools to do those things should not get out of the way. They should be clearly defined and separate from the content.

Louie Mantia, Jr.Jun 28

The problem is not the introduction of glass as an element of the visual design language. If used as the Dock background alone, it would be totally fine! But because someone said “UI should get out of the way” and no one challenged it—instead of content literally being the focus, Apple has to intentionally put content *out of focus* (blurring) to make the glass elements visible. They have to put a gradient behind the glass so you can see it. That should’ve been the “oh, it doesn’t work” moment.

Louie Mantia, Jr.Jun 28

But here we are with a new visual design language that somehow manages to compromise on both the content area *and* the UI.

I’m *living* on macOS Tahoe and I’m here to tell you that the apps that are a pleasure to use are the ones that haven’t adopted Liquid Glass (in essence... all the third-party apps.)

This should be a blog post. But I need to collect my thoughts and write it all better. So consider this a beta version. lol

Riccardo Mori Jun 28

@louie > But here we are with a new visual design language that somehow manages to compromise on both the content area *and* the UI.

This. So much this. I’ve had this truth before my eyes for the past 3 weeks, and I couldn’t condense it in so few words.

Senna 🌷Jun 28

@louie I'm taking away a lesson from this: UI should be visually apparent such that it is easily found and recognized when needed. The user needs UI to interact with the content, so why shouldn't it have a distinct presence?

UI usually shouldn't be so flashy that it draws attention away from the content, but simultaneously it should not fade into the background and become illegible. Somehow Apple seems to be missing the mark on both of these points.

Using the AVP as a point of inspiration for the UI of their other OSs is a big mistake I think. It's more of a neat science project than a successful product.

John Parker Jun 28

@louie It feels a lot like they’ve forgotten that a computer is a tool, rather than a means of consuming content.

Not🐧A🐧Convicted🐧Felon Jun 28

@Middaparka @louie This.

Jonathan Hendry Jun 28

@Middaparka @louie

Or they want it to be for consuming content - F1! Intruding into a space near you! - and nothing else.

Óscar Morales Vivó 4d ago

@Middaparka @louie it can be both, but used to be they were tools first and now are consumption devices first.

Which may be one of the main reasons the macOS UI changes of the last years have rubbed so many people the wrong way. They are still meant to be tool-first devices but are being evolved with the sensibilities of consumption-first devices.

John Gruber Jun 28

@louie I have never once gotten the impression that anyone on Alan Dye’s UI team uses serious pro tool apps. They love making beautiful looking things, not solving difficult UI problems with clever solutions. And I suspect when confronted with difficult UI problems, they say “Shut up with that nerd stuff.”

Himalaya Jun 28

@gruber @louie where did Alan dye come from?

John Gruber Jun 28

@Himalaya @louie Levi’s and Kate Spade.

https://debbiemillman.blogspot.com/2007/11/design-matters-live-tonight-with-alan.html

debbie millman: Design Matters Live, Tonight with Alan Dye

Himalaya Jun 28

@gruber @louie I am trying to make sense of one more thing, why glass?

When Google introduced material design, it was inspired by paper & ink which makes sense tbh. We write on paper and we interact with paper in real life.

But why glass? I get that glass is a real life thing, but where do we see this liquid glass in real life? Or am I missing something and I am dumb?

@Himalaya @gruber @louie You’re not dumb, but I don’t think Material Design is all that useful either. Translating paper and ink into a glass screen makes less sense (to me) than trying to make it feel like you’re directly interacting with the glass.

I think Liquid Glass is a great direction, but v1 definitely has some poor implementations.

Adam Faircloth Jun 28

@gruber @Himalaya @louie Dye himself has said that he's "terrible" and is afraid someday Cook will realize that.

I mean we all have imposter syndrome sometimes, but surely some of us are right when we think it...

Jonathan Hendry Jun 28

@fcloth @gruber @Himalaya @louie

Sometimes the imposter syndrome is trying to help you escape a situation that isn’t right for you.

Craig Hockenberry Jun 28

@gruber @louie I’m not even sure they’ve used a Mac for a full day’s work.

Mindaugas Rudokas Jun 28

@chockenberry @gruber @louie Wait, what are you implying here? They do the UI design directly in Keynote? :)

Who is Mica for then?

Jonathan Hendry Jun 28

@mrudokas @chockenberry @gruber @louie

The underlings who implement the bad ideas?

Mindaugas Rudokas Jun 28

@jonhendry @chockenberry @gruber @louie Looking at the Icon Composer and how it was presented during the WWDC, I kind of don’t know what to think.

I know it’s v1, but it’s like doing the handoff to yourself, over, and over, and over again – more or less.

If that is the understanding of the proper tooling and development convenience, then it’s really fucked up – the bicycle for your mind ideology may be gone. But how? There are smart people inside, guaranteed!

Mindaugas Rudokas Jun 28

@jonhendry @chockenberry @gruber @louie

Best course of action after beta period? What would be the modern version of pitch forks and torches in this situation?

1. Lawsuit based on demanding accessibility rights.

2. Infiltrate Apple, teach good taste.

3. Show how it is done from outside. (No leverage to apply force.)

4. Infiltrate Apple, steal the macOS source code, release as torrents, die in jail.

5. Hack Apple, steal the macOS source code, release as torrents, live anonymous.

...

Mindaugas Rudokas Jun 28

@jonhendry @chockenberry @gruber @louie

6. Bring back the modding, the skinning, the Winamp/beOS era through OS patches without having source code, use other UI frameworks, build new ones.

7. Build fucking web apps.

8. Write angry blogposts and tweets, if you can see where to click to send those.

9. Do nothing. Wait for RC. Die in despair.

10. All move to EU, pass laws from there.

...

Mindaugas Rudokas Jun 28

@jonhendry @chockenberry @gruber @louie

11. Mass-downgrade. (Global user base will not follow, can’t make apps as business without new versions of toolchains).

12. Pitch forks and torches.

@chockenberry @gruber @louie Apple should force their UI team to use Windows for all corporate tasks. No phones, nothing but windows. They will become passionate about UI design.

Craig Hockenberry Jun 28

@gruber @louie The leading indicator for that is notifications, of course.

Louie Mantia, Jr.Jun 28

@chockenberry @gruber this. I’ve said it so many times now but I’m not convinced the people making decisions even like computers.

Matt Thomas Jun 28

@louie @chockenberry opinions on this being a knock-on effect of mock-up tools like Figma? I frequently run into issues where designers spend far more time in these tools than using the actual app. I get more feedback if implementations don’t pixel-perfect match “comps” rather than actual usage

Louie Mantia, Jr.Jun 28

@codecaffeine
¯\ (°‿っ°) /¯
I don’t want to spend much time theorizing. I don’t know what happened. I don’t want to pretend like I do.

Óscar Morales Vivó 4d ago

@codecaffeine @louie @chockenberry the “pretty pictures” UI design workflow. Make some pretty pictures, get important people excited about them, hand over to engineers.

Then move on to the next thing, your job is done!

Chris Hanson 3d ago

@codecaffeine @louie @chockenberry And Apple’s internal mockup tools. They let designers obsess over the look of an application when they should be drawing from a standard set of units in order to implement a way of working. If someone wants a button to look completely unique rather than the standard UI style, they’re wrong, and they should feel bad.

@eschaton @codecaffeine @louie @chockenberry Decades of pro and consumer apps from Apple alone beg to differ. It’s perfectly reasonable to deviate and to create custom controls.

ProKit had a bespoke pipeline including animations for decades pre-Figma, pre-Sketch. It’s not a tooling problem, it’s about the design culture and approval chain.

Chris Hanson 3d ago

@bgannin @codecaffeine @louie @chockenberry Apple is not exactly the gold standard here. ProKit’s design was function-first; it wasn’t dark to Look Cool, it was dark to avoid imparting tint to edited content, and often its controls had extra features that didn’t just make them aesthetically different buttons. And it should have been available to third parties from the start, as part of AppKit or as its own framework.

@eschaton @codecaffeine @louie @chockenberry You contradict yourself while proving my point.

“If someone wants a button to look completely unique rather than the standard UI style, they’re wrong, and they should feel bad.” <- that reads as ProKit shouldn’t have been made unless in the OS, but you assert the value of doing so

For the record, ProKit was very aesthetically driven with per major release variants of gray (I worked on Aperture and contributed to PK a bit.)

St. Chris Jun 28

@gruber @louie I’m reading these posts in Ivory on iOS 18 on an iPhone 16 Pro and noticing how this huge tall screen has plenty of space for the reading material *even with* solid zones at the top and bottom where the buttons are. It suddenly strikes me that it’s like an iPhone 7 with the controls moved off to the forehead and chin, and it feels right. I wish there were one persistent full-screen toggle button (onscreen *or* physical) to show/hide the UI.

I honestly still miss the home button.

@gruber @louie see also “how do you make a beautiful ui with many buttons”… “hum, I don’t know so… hide them all into a single one?

Peter van Broekhoven Jun 28

@gruber @louie it’s almost as if playing with glass baubles on a table isn’t enough when designing a new UI.

esconner Jun 28

@gruber @louie I’m not sure when in the design process they made those physical clear and tinted glass/plastic objects seen in the Liquid Glass introduction and how exactly they used them (Do you know?). It seems to me that they could be a pretty good tool for imagining beautiful and very large or extremely zoomed in digital mockups and demos of UIs. Actual normal sized (comparatively small) UI not so much.

@gruber @louie Every feature Alan Dye doesn’t personally use gets stuffed behind the 3-dot menu.

Chris Hanson 3d ago

@gruber @louie You’ve got it. Human interface is about how it works, not what it looks like, and focusing overmuch on the look doesn’t just do users a disservice, it perverts the application frameworks themselves. The existence of NSVisualEffectView is an abomination.

Louie Mantia, Jr.3d ago

@eschaton pardon but how it looks is very important. People love to pluck out the Steve Jobs “design is how it works” but forget he said “design isn’t just how it looks” first.

Victor Zambrano 3d ago

@louie @eschaton and the looks also have to work.

Jamie Froggatt Jun 28

@louie If you’re interested in other takes, I’m using iPadOS 26 full-time, and I like it.

It feels physical. Controls feel like they’re ‘on top’ of the content the same way tools sit on top of a desk.

For gallery apps (Files, Reminders, Photos), the use of floating buttons, rather than solid toolbars with empty portions at many window sizes, is a much better use of space.

Button grouping is useful.

It also just fits well with the shape of the screen and the device, and looks cool.

Jamie Froggatt Jun 28

@louie Looking at the Xcode beta, it seems they do have an answer for editor apps which need to be more down-to-business.

Louie Mantia, Jr.Jun 28

@SalvagedTechnic Yes, where the answer is “well of course we still have delineated toolbars.”

They know they can’t apply this everywhere.

Jamie Froggatt Jun 28

@louie Yeah! Perhaps having more choice in design approach between apps with different goals is a deliberate move?

We’ve only seen one editor app from Apple so far with the new design, and there are more to come, and designers at Apple knew this. They’re smart people too. I think it’s interesting to try and get inside their heads through their decision process, and I think it starts from seeing the minimal toolbars in consumer apps and wanting a better answer for those cases.

Louie Mantia, Jr.Jun 28

@SalvagedTechnic I’m sorry, but the crux of this is the requirement to think they’re right and we need to understand it rather than the possibility they might be wrong. I cannot possibly subscribe to any thought process where I cannot evaluate the possibility of it being wrong.

Jamie Froggatt Jun 29

@louie Sorry if it seemed like I was suggesting they’re right. My reply wasn’t about picking a side, just around the idea of knocking down a steel-man rather than a straw-man as a tool for insightful critique.

Jamie Froggatt Jun 29

@louie Because for sure, there are problems with the new design.

But a lot of the critiques I’ve seen so far just throw everything out and come up with a new design, or suggest the old design but modified. Which then doesn’t actually go into the problems with this design in much detail or depth, it becomes more of a ‘Look, I can design better than Apple’.

Louie Mantia, Jr.Jun 28

@SalvagedTechnic well, I wasn’t really inviting others to share their opinions but good for you I guess (??) I’m not trying to be rude. I just wasn’t asking for that.

Jamie Froggatt Jun 28

@louie Fair! I’ve been critiquing some of the new stuff, and would love new perspectives on it where it can make me feel better about the changes.

Looking forward to the article! I think with your experience you’ll put the issues into focus better than I could!

@louie yeah this is it in a nutshell

Mike Piontek Jun 28

@louie One thing that’s really wild is that there’s no longer any indication of where you can drag a window? Not even a hover state or pointer change. The only way to know where you can drag a window from is if you know how it used to be designed. They’ve really crossed a line where “focus on the content” has become a goal itself rather than a goal to serve a purpose (like maximizing screen space, or removing clutter when it’s a distraction)

Louie Mantia, Jr.Jun 28

@robotspacer dude yes it’s killing me. It entirely relies on your platform memory and guessing. Terrible.

@louie Totally agree. And to add: By placing the UI elements onto the content, by adding blurs and translucence, by introducing floating sidebars with seams around them where content shines through, the designers are adding visual noise. This does the opposite — it smudges over the content instead of getting out of its way.

Louie Mantia, Jr.Jun 28

@reimar Definitely compromising on what’s good about both to make both... worse.

Christian Beer Jun 28

@louie 💯
There can be apps that are ONLY about the content and the UI should get out of the way.
But most apps should have both modes, like Keynote, Photos, Preview, … one mode is about the content and the other is about the UI. View mode vs. edit mode. The edit mode should then focus on the UI/UX #my2ct

Louie Mantia, Jr.Jun 28

@chbeer Right. Glass away in a QuickTime Player window. See if I care! (The tab bar in these kinds of apps is atrocious, however.)

Riccardo Mori Jun 28

@louie We’re on the same page, once again. From my latest post:

Matt Godden Jun 28

@louie Someone at Apple created a tool to make realtime glass physics a thing the compositing engine could do. Then everyone fell in love with the tools so much they lost sight of what they were using the tools to make. It didn't matter if the OS became unusable, the UI a dumpsterfire of wasted space and excessive corner radii, as long as they got to use the Glass tools to make it, they were content. Soon everything that fails to serve using Glass will be gone.

Louie Mantia, Jr.Jun 28

@metaning well, that’s a nice story but there’s no way I’m going to put that narrative into my brain as anything that resembles a fact.