As a person with a modest passion for archivability of internet ephemera, I find the single-link-in-bio model to be so, so tormentful. How could a creator ever confidently say “check out the link in my bio” if they know that in the future, the link they are directing people to press will have changed to something else, the prior link lost to time? Here’s Mia Sato, on The Vergecast episode from May…
I hate AI generated images. Not a bold or unique position, but to some surprise, I used to love them. Years ago. In 2020, I was publishing a niche webcomic involving aliens, and I wanted a unique and visually outstanding way to portray otherworldly background visuals- but to maintain my rapid publishing pace, I wanted all that, but without having to either illustrate those visuals, 3D model them,…
The month of May comes to a very busy end for me personally1, and with it closes our May edition of the Swift Blog Carnival, which I once again thank Christian Tietze greatly for offering me to host for the month. I’m honored to have gotten the response I did to my call for posts, and I’m excited to share everyone’s takes!
This is a call to join the topic-of-the-month for the Swift Blog Carnival! This month, we focus on the already-on-your-mind discussion about the limits you ran into with SwiftUI. Carnival...
For the past few weeks since “releasing” my first app to the public on GitHub1, I kept iterating and improving the app. Here’s a snapshot of it today: I’ve added several features, and however silly it might sound for this little solo tool, it’s exciting to get to write a blogpost like this and show the many quality of life improvements like it’s a Big New Release™! For example, I considered the…
There’s a beauty in how the Mac commits to “the desktop and files” metaphor. I think it’s admirable how ever since the earliest days of the Human Interface Guidelines, direct manipulation has been a core benefit of the operating systems: You Can Just Move Things Around. I want to explore how its been a phenomenal success, and where it has drifted off course. There’s some aspects of this direct…
I have “released” my first Mac application, Meshmaker, on GitHub as a public repository, so anyone can download the project and run/install it using Xcode. Now, this isn’t really “A release”. The project isn’t finished, but it’s functional1. I still think it’s already quite usable as a way to make nice gradients pretty easily, with a good amount of depth. It took me (what I felt like was) very…
I’ve been putting together a small app, and trying to make it very very good. I’m coding the whole thing1 myself because I enjoy the challenges that come with logic coding, and find writing SwiftUI code pretty fun and fast. It’s a SwiftUI utility to create Mesh Gradients, which are not intuitive to create manually by code like other SwiftUI elements can be. There’s other tools floating around, but…
Brandon McMullen, on where the MacBook Neo leaves the iPad: “Will a MacBook Neo be better for an artist who draws for a living? How about a small child? What about people on construction sites? How about for your tech illiterate grandma? Is a MacBook better for an airline pilot?” I think the iPad is an amazing thing when its allowed to breathe its own air, and the MacBook Neo might just let it…
I’m trying out a ton of design and art software at once (which I might write a blogpost about), and today I got into Pixelmator Pro, and when figuring out the Effects panel, I was overjoyed at this design detail: When I first pressed that button, I had 0 doubt about what was being displayed to me. Instantly clear UI I’ve never seen anyone discuss.
Today, Apple announced “the new iPhone 17e”. I personally have an iPhone 16e, so naturally, I have no reason to upgrade. This was expected, as I am not the audience. Apple tells you as much themselves, as the product page offers comparisons to what they assume your iPhone is: iPhone 11, iPhone 12, or maybe some iPhone SE. If you have an iPhone 13 or newer, Apple isn’t trying to get you to buy this…
There is a horrible disease in web design I see everywhere. On one end, it has infected Apple, Microsoft, Google and more, and on the other end of the spectrum, small, niche, hand-coded passionate bloggers and coders. It is the hijacking of the vertical scroll for dramatic effect.I despite this.
I don’t have anything to say about the Apple Creator Studio announcement that wasn't already said better, but I gotta say, there’s something I find deeply compelling about pre-release marketing material, especially idiosyncrasies and oddities in it. Look at these two screenshots from different parts of Apple’s website.
Matt Birchler, on vibe coding small tools: And you know what? It worked. The UI wasn't perfect, but it was damn close. And I already had a product that achieved the goal I set out to achieve. All in all, I'd say it was about 10 minutes from idea to functioning MVP (and half of that was finishing my run). (Do read the entire thing! This post is very much a direct continuation of my thoughts after…
Forgive my tinfoil hat, but…As Apple leans more and more into reflective surfaces, 3D illusions and bouncy visuals, perfectly concentric menus and device bezels and a haptic, tactile sensory experience, Google and Android have refined the appearance of “Material Design” further and further, resulting in the current cutting-edge version of this design language - Material 3 Expressive.
This is exciting.We’ve seen AI make and manipulate text, and do it pretty well.We’ve seen AI make and manipulate images, and do it… uh… At scale.But Google keeps trying to make this new thing. This more evolved thing. The difference reminds me of the jump from an HTML article to an application. Let’s go step by step, first the promise, what I think is fantastic, what you think is really worrying,…
The only reason me and my partner considered a PC was playing games. If the Steam Machine can also be easily used to stream/record gameplay, and maybe even run Discord too, there’s no longer a reason for me to see Windows again in the foreseeable future.
Murmurings of a “capacitive button only” iPhone have been floating about for a while. This rings alarm bells for some, excites others, and I wanted to formulate my thoughts on the idea.
Reading Federico Viticci’s fantastic iOS & iPadOS 26 review, I had a tiny quibble about one thing, and it’s something many other people who discuss the new iPad multitasking system said recently: the notion that “Apple added Mac windowing, unchanged, to the iPad”. Window management now works “exactly how it does on a Mac”. I wish to be enthusiastically pedantic and say: Not the case.
Meta recently unveiled their new, actually shipping this month, glasses that show you little apps on your eye. Their content is visible only to the wearer, can be read in broad daylight, and don’t look like ski goggles that isolate you from reality. They look like glasses and work like magic.You can attach a bunch of asterisks into these claims- they’re pretty bulky for “regular glasses”- but the…
A lot of good pieces have been going around about the new icon language. About how it’s unfair to developers to not conform to the squircle. About how it seems Apple’s lesser apps have been adapted embarrassingly lazily. About how maybe this design language will make sense in a future product we don’t quite understand yet. And I agree. But all those problems could be wrapped up in the simple issue…
There’s a mistake at the core of Apple’s new Liquid Glass hierarchy. It’s that because the new material introduced for the design is semi-transparent in a new way, it should go above content whenever possible, enriching the experience.I think this is untrue.I think this new material makes for a visually appealing effect when it overlaps content, but seeking that result is confusing.
Your name is ALAN DYE. You work at APPLE COMPUTERS INC. You have recently shipped a controversial new DESIGN SYSTEM, centering around LIQUID GLASS. Luckily for you, the system is still in BETA.
I find concentricity in design beautiful.There’s something deeply “correct” to my brain about how from the bezels to the apps I use the most, a single anchoring point guides the design. And even with my deep love for concentricity- I also think applying it to everything is deeply misguided.
I had a lot of hopes in the UX of Image Playground since it was announced. If we leave aside the fact the images generated by the app are still, just not very good, the process of image creation itself was promising to bring something new to the table that I feel went amiss.