❓Have you noticed that digital products and services are getting worse? So have we!

➡️We have published a report about enshittification, on how and why digital products and services keep getting worse - and how we can turn the trend (hint: open tech, enforcement, public policy++)

Obviously @pluralistic is a big inspiration and help in this work.

More than 80 groups in Europe and the US has joined in a call to action.

More here: https://www.forbrukerradet.no/breakingfree

Enjoy this short film!

Introducing Octavo, my Mac app for turning PDFs into booklets, cleaning up bad scans, printing zines, labels, and more.

If you follow me, you may have seen my #BuildInPublic journey developing it over the last few months! It's now launched, and is available on the Mac App Store for $25 (via in app purchase so you can try before you buy).

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/octavo/id6757485225?mt=12

For more info, the website has more screenshots and a copy of the user's guide: https://octavo.pro

#mac #pdf #software

ssh is an obscure but widely-deployed command. It stands for Secure Snake Home and was made in the 90s to securely play snake online

I made a massively multiplayer backend for it with support for thousands of concurrent snake players

ssh snakes.run to join!

The Tahoe menu icon madness in a nutshell:

Apple knew a better way,
they used to use a better way,
now they do it differently but worse.

https://tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-icons/

It's very cumbersome to launch unsigned apps on Mac OS these days, so I thought about making an app – "Opener" – where you could drag and drop unsigned apps or other items the OS refuses to open. It would remove the quarantine attribute and launch them. I ended up satisfying my need with a simple AppleScript – really I just needed an excuse to draw an app icon 🤭

Conceptually I liked the idea of a bottle opener better, but a drinks can worked better in the format.

Celluloid: A Virtual Camera App for macOS

I’ve had a Logitech C920 webcam for years. It’s a solid camera, but I’ve always hated its color grading — it pushes everything red, making me look perpetually sunburned on video calls.

Zoom has a “Touch up my appearance” filter that helped a bit, but most of my calls happen in Google Meet, which doesn’t have anything comparable. I wanted a solution that worked across all my video apps — set it once and forget it.

So I built one.

Introducing Celluloid – Camera Filters

Celluloid is a macOS menu bar app that creates a virtual camera with real-time filters and color adjustments. Select “Celluloid Camera” in any video app — Zoom, Google Meet, FaceTime, Microsoft Teams, OBS — and your enhanced video just works.

Features include:

• Film-inspired filters — Black Mist (dreamy diffusion), Halation (vintage highlight bloom), Gate Weave (film projector movement), plus classics like Noir and Chrome
• Color controls — Brightness, contrast, saturation, exposure, color temperature, and sharpness
• Built-in LUTs — Professional color grades ready to use, including one specifically tuned to fix the Logitech C920’s color issues
• Battery friendly — The camera only activates when an app is actually using it
• Privacy focused — All processing happens locally on your Mac. No data collected or transmitted.

How It Works

Celluloid uses Apple’s CMIOExtension framework to register a virtual camera device with macOS. The main app captures video from your physical webcam, applies filters using Core Image and custom Metal shaders, then sends the processed frames to the camera extension via CoreMediaIO sink streams.

The technical journey was interesting — I tried several IPC approaches (file-based sharing, CFPreferences, shared memory) before landing on sink streams, which turned out to be the correct approach for CMIOExtensions running in their restricted sandbox.

Some technical highlights:

• SwiftUI for the interface
• AVFoundation for camera capture
• Metal-backed CIContext for GPU-accelerated filter processing
• Custom Metal shaders for the Black Mist diffusion effect
• CVPixelBufferPool for efficient buffer reuse
• Darwin notifications for IPC between the app and extension

Get It

Celluloid – Camera Filters is available now on the Mac App Store.

The code is open source on GitHub.

If you’ve ever wished you could look a little better on video calls without buying studio lighting, give it a try. And if you have ideas for new filters or LUTs, I’d love to hear them.

My Ubuntu Summit talk is up! Where I talk about:
1. How Desktop UX is effectively dead
2. Why I hate the term UX/UI with the heat of 1000 suns
3. How OSS can actually innovate in #ux

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fZTOjd_bOQ

Let’s talk about AI art.

https://theoatmeal.com/comics/ai_art