A website mostly about Mac stuff, written by Gus Mueller
Years ago, I wrote a little bit about an artist named Jeremy Mann and how inspiring I found him and his work (visit the post to read my gushing). I mentioned Mann to a friend today and started rewatching his video Behind the Dark Room , and got sucked in of course. It's required watching for anyone who didn't watch it the first time around. Yes this is homework. I'm also incredibly happy to see…
Nate (no last name that I can find) - Don't use your phone while you poop : When we stop feeding our brains constant input, they can finally attend to the housekeeping of the mind. In this state they'll consolidate memories, connect ideas, process emotions, and most likely generate high-scoring Scrabble words. If our brains were pizza chefs, they would take down those spinning pies you've been…
Acorn 8.6 is out! The big new things are: A new brushing engine that has been rewritten using Metal shaders. It includes an option for “velocity thinning”, where the faster you draw your brush strokes, the thinner the lines. A new acorn shell tool that you can use to send JavaScript to Acorn, as well as start an MCP server. So if you’ve got a favorite LLM you like to use, you can now use it to…
Paul Kafasis on the Rogue Amoeba Blog: Free The Icons : With last year’s release of MacOS 26 (Tahoe), Apple made a mess of app icons. In the first betas of MacOS 27 (Golden Gate), however, there are signs of a turnaround. We’re urging Apple to continue making improvements, by restoring the ability for MacOS app icons to have distinct shapes. I wholeheartedly agree. I get why Apple did it, but I…
Artem Loenko: Native all the way, until you need text : I did everything people say you should do. Native all the way. I know the platform. I know the options. I know SwiftUI, AppKit, TextKit, WebKit. But I still cannot make a simple thing work properly: a chat with Markdown & the ability to select a whole message. And suddenly it becomes much clearer why most new chat-heavy apps that depend on…
I was asked today how to make square crops in Acorn while keeping the aspect ratio when you resize the square. It’s pretty easy to do if you know a couple of keyboard shortcuts . First, press the 'c' and 's' keys in quick oder (this is short for “crop square”). This will automatically add a square crop to your image. (Another good one I use all the time is pressing the 'c' key twice, which will…
To create a fundamentally better editor, we had to invent a new approach to building desktop software. Our previous editor, Atom, was built as a fork of Chromium, spawning the Electron framework in the process. Electron eventually became the foundation of VS Code (which today seems to be forked into a new AI code editor every other week). Web technology offered an easy path to shipping flexible…
Joshua Heath Scott on successful bands: When you’re furious that another entity is successful, when you’re convinced they cheated, when you can’t stop picking apart how they did it , that fury is almost never about them. It’s about you. I know this because I’ve felt it. Every successful founder has. You watch someone else’s thing take off and your brain, being a survival machine, immediately…
Craig Mod, MacBook Neo and How the iPad Could Be : The MacBook Neo is about six years late. Back in 2020, when the iPad Pro’s 4th generation model — the one with trackpad support — was released, there was a group of us who slapped the new Magic Keyboard with trackpad on it and thought, immediately: Give me this machine with macOS. Like everything Mod writes, I want to quote it all. I won’t but…
Tolaria is a “A second brain for the AI era”. It’s a MacOS app that sits atop Markdown files, uses Git for backups, and is open source. It also runs on Linux. I wrote a similar version of this app for myself (named “Muellerpad” of course) so I was intrigued. I downloaded Tolaria, gave it a spin by importing the 2.5k Markdown files that make up my website to see how would hold up. It was…
I‘ve just release Acorn 8.5 , which has some new features, nice SVG improvements, and some good bug fixes. Here are my favorites: There’s a new “ Bendable ” type of Arrow shape which lets you add a nice adjustable curve to your arrow. You can also have arrow heads on either end (or both) of the shape. This has been a feature request for many years, so I’m glad to finally add it. SVG importing has…
512 Pixels: Mac OS X Shipped 25 Years Ago . I still remember using the public betas, and Mac OS Server before that. Display Postscript is the thing that sticks out as being the most amazing to me at the time. And then Mac OS X brought Display PDF, which was a great step beyond that as well. Happy Birthday, Mac OS X.
There’s been a lot of talk recently about Liquid Glass on MacOS, and it being an abomination (epic rant from Nilay Patel there). OK, it’s not recent, but there’s still a lot of talk and Nilay’s rant got me thinking: If Apple was to move away from Liquid Glass on MacOS, how would they do it? As I was futzing around with Acorn’s plist I realized that maybe the answer might already there. Mac apps…
CasNum (Compass and straightedge Number) is a library that implements arbitrary precision arithmetic using compass and straightedge constructions. Arbitrary precision arithmetic, now with 100% more Euclid. Featuring a functional modified Game Boy emulator where every ALU opcode is implemented entirely through geometric constructions. I’m sorry, what? This project began with a simple…
In episode 680 of ATP , at about 6:12 in, Marco Arment goes off on watchOS 26’s fitness app and trashes all the changes. And I couldn’t agree more with him. I thought it was just me who hated all the changes, and the slow animations, and the workout picker. It’s such a regression I don’t even know where to start. Arment is considering getting a Garmin watch to replace his Apple Watch, and while…
Greg Knauss ▸ Lose Myself : I got into computers because solving puzzles was fun, and building worlds was fun, and making things — the process of making things — was fun, down at the granular level. It was nice to have something at the end, but the act of creation was the exciting part. I suspect that predilection will begin to disappear (in commercial environments, at the very least), now that…
Matthew Butterick ▸ Does software piracy exist? : From time to time, readers let me know that my fonts are circulating on such-and-such website devoted to some category of software piracy. Well yes—of course they are. In the font world, as in most areas of software endeavor, there’s been much hand-wringing over the last 40 years about the (supposedly) massive losses to this kind of…
Last year China installed more than half of all wind and solar added globally. In May alone, it added enough renewable energy to power Poland, installing solar panels at a rate of roughly 100 every second. The massive buildout is happening across the country, from crowded eastern cities increasingly topped by rooftop solar panels to remote western deserts where colossal wind farms sprawl across…
Josh Scott: John Mayer And The Coming Simulacra : There’s a video making the rounds right now. John Mayer is sitting in his studio, switching between his amplifiers — his actual 1964 Fender Vibroverb, his Dumble Steel String Singer #002, his Two-Rock prototype — and a software plugin that a company called Neural DSP built by modeling those exact pieces of gear. He’s playing. He’s listening. He…
Anil Dash: How Markdown Took Over the World : As hard as it may be to believe, back in 2004, the default was that people made new standards for open technologies like Markdown, and just shared them freely for the good of the internet, and the world, and then went on about their lives. If it happened to have unleashed billions of dollars of value for others, then so much the better. If they got…