Thomas
Walichiewicz

Claude ‘Design’ is a misnomer.

If you think ‘design’ has anything to do with pushing pixels, you never understood what design actually is (or have any business claiming to have reinvented it).

The new MacBook Neo is genuinely interesting. Apple finally made a Mac that feels aimed at the huge group of people who do not need “Pro” anything: students, families, coffee-shop writers, and maybe even the old 12-inch MacBook crowd. A $599 aluminum Mac with a 13-inch display and fanless A18 Pro is a very Apple way of attacking the low end: not cheap-looking, just strategically constrained.

What throws me is the name. Apple’s naming system is usually pretty legible: iPad, Air, Pro, Max, Ultra, maybe SE, and now even 17e. The regular 11-inch iPad sells to basically the same mainstream audience and uses the same kind of bright, approachable color strategy, yet Apple just calls it iPad. “Neo” sounds more like a concept-car trim or a side brand than a permanent Mac tier. It does not immediately tell you where this machine sits relative to the Air, and that is usually the one thing Apple naming is very good at.

If Apple wanted a budget signifier, it had cleaner options. It just revived that language with iPhone 17e, and Apple has used it on Macs before with the eMac. My guess is that “MacBook e” simply looked awkward, so “Neo” became the escape hatch, maybe with a little help from Apple already using Neo Tricot in the store. But that is exactly why the name feels odd: the product feels coherent, while the branding feels like a workaround.

We aren’t witnessing a rejection of AI, but a rejection of how it’s being deployed. The current ‘slop’ isn’t an inherent technological limitation; it’s a failure of product design and execution by the industry’s biggest players.

I’ve been following this thread regarding the Claude Code change I wrote about last week and it’s certainly been…lively.

In case you’ve ever wondered how I publish on this static blog, here’s a preview of the custom publishing tool I built. I’ll get around to a full write-up eventually. I call it Draft.

You can now embarrass yourself/your friend in Typing Tennis with multiplayer support.

Just a lil’ update for a lil’ tennis game.

Shout out to the thousands of people who played Typing Tennis in the first 24 hours (!).

Created a new experience for viewing impact metrics on mobile, check it out with the 🎖️ button in the header. Happy New Years Eve!

Update: Desktop now supported as well.

:near should be added as a pseudoclass in the CSS specification. Proximity-based styling would be a great addition to the affordance toolkit of designers.

We actually see this pattern fairly regularly in consumer electronics: you’ll bring your hand near a set of controls and either the display will update, the button will glow brighter, etc.

Example:
button:near(200px){ border: solid 1px black; }

Update: https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/13271

Backlog of design and tech topics to finish blog posts about < Keep working on WorkspaceOS

Apple’s gaming strategy is so bizarre. Early on it basically was the platform for gaming (remember when Halo was previewed at MacWorld? (What sort of weird alternate timeline would we have had if Apple bought it instead of Microsoft? Would there even be an Xbox?)) and it again regained that title, but as a side effect of the iPhone’s portable-but-powerful platform.

But their current strategy seems lacking.

• Why isn’t there an integration with Steam? You’re not getting around the fact that people have huge collections of purchases on that platform, so having some way to not double-purchase by linking your Steam and App Store accounts would already help.
• This new Games app is basically just the App Store but pared down without the junk.
• Why doesn’t Apple have an in-house porting team? If a company like Nightdive can come in and fill the gap by porting classic titles to modern platforms, I’m sure Apple could pull their weight to help convince developers.

People always mention how macOS isn’t a large enough platform to justify developing games for it, but I’d argue that if more games supported it (and ran well), why would anyone want to have to buy both a Mac and a PC? They could accelerate this effort by taking a similar strategy to what Sony did to reverse their fortunes in the 360/PS3 era—find the top-tier, critically acclaimed games and port those to macOS. That alone would shift the conversation to “Well, with a Mac I’ll always be able to play the top games, but maybe I miss out on the random indie stuff.”

Apple Music’s autoplay feature would be so much better if it remembered what you’ve already heard in your current session. Nothing worse than it queuing up the same “recommended” songs that just played 30 minutes ago when you were in a different playlist.

Maybe keep track of the last 50 songs played? Just a thought.

Took a little while, but I’ve added inline demoes to the Works page! Started with one of the tricker ones, Custom Install (look for the (DEMO) sticker).

What if YouTube borrowed SoundCloud’s timecode comments—letting viewers pin insights to exact moments?

YouTube comments already lean heavily on timestamps. Livestream VODs use third-party tools to overlay chat reactions. And if a user doesn’t want to see them? Just add a toggle in settings.

0:05 / 0:15

CC

Settings

Community Commentary

Playback speed Normal ›

Quality Auto ›

crumb cat dancing to wii shop music (15 second loop)

847K views • 3 months ago

Comments

Comments

Newest By timecode

@ 0:00

Cancel Comment

T

@TomNook 0:02

Already vibing 🎶

C

@CatLover2024 0:04

The way crumb bobs to the beat here is EVERYTHING 😸

N

@NostalgicGamer 0:06

This takes me back to Saturday afternoons

V

@VirtuallyVibe 0:08

HERE COMES THE BEST PART!! 🔥🔥🔥

D

@DanceCat 0:09

My cat literally stopped what he was doing to dance

B

@BeatDropper 0:10

This drop hits different at 2x speed 😤

M

@MemeMaster 0:13

POV: It's 2008 and you're spending your allowance on Wii Points 🥲

YouTube Timecode Comments Demo

Found a stack of my old design notebooks tucked away in a drawer today. Pages filled with sketches, half-formed ideas, and that particular kind of energy that comes from putting pen to paper without overthinking it.

There’s something about the tactile process of sketching that digital tools can’t quite replicate. The weight of the pencil, the texture of paper, the way ideas flow more freely when your hand is moving. Those notebooks captured a rawness and immediacy that made me want to bring some of that spirit back to my work.

Felt inspired enough to completely redo the Works page. Sometimes you need to look back to move forward.

Now that we have AutoMix, can I have it trigger when I hit the Next button?

Don’t punish me with an abrupt stop/start between songs, queue up the next song in the background and then immediately start blending into the next song. If you still want to retain the current functionality just make a double-tap of the Next button expedite the transition to the next song (maybe even throw in a record-scratch sfx for good measure).

Update: If you want to be really clever about the above mechanism, have the behavior adapt depending how much of the song the user has listened to– less than 3 sec played? Jump straight to the next song, they don’t want to hear any more of the current one.

You’ll know a tool is agency-first when your first keystroke is a question—and the canvas answers while legacy controls watch from the margins.

Downside: accidentally posted a rough draft of my next long post early.

Upside: found a weird drafts publishing bug, now fixed.

Looks like Apple is ending the iOS Photos.app interaction paradigm experiment with bimodal swipe-to-switch state. I get why they tried it—a navigation bar for only 2 modes feels like overkill. But a hidden gesture was probably too subtle.

The eternal UI challenge: when you have exactly two modes, every solution feels wrong. Too few for a nav bar, too important for a buried gesture. It’s like the dropdown rule—you need 3+ options to justify the pattern.

Old and busted: sharing Netflix credentials
New hotness: sharing Claude Max keys

The fancy-shmancy desktop mode is disabled for now while I work out some Chrome bugs. 🪳🔨

I’ve gone ahead and rewritten several of the project pages, as well as added some fun UI elements. Enjoy!

Is it too much to ask for music players to finally get dynamic transitions between songs? No more jarring stop-and-start. Just have a mini LLM generate seamless transitions using the stems of each track.

The functionality could work as dip-in, dip-out—when you stop adding to your Play Next queue, a station forms dynamically. You can take control back whenever it veers off or you want something specific.

+4318 -1276
Deployed another set of changes 😮‍💨

THIS is what Apple CarPlay Ultra looks like?

This looks like a rough mock you put together before you spend time polishing the visuals to match the level of craftsmanship clear in the physical design of the car. This might have been amazing back in the early 2000’s when car infotainment systems were a running joke, but now this is being compared against Rivian, Lucid, Volvo, and others.

Apple pitches Ultra as “deeply integrated and fully skinnable,” but Aston’s launch video shows the stock iOS palette pasted over six-figure craftsmanship. Meanwhile, the flat-grey HVAC sliders ignore the cabin’s knurled toggles, and the music widget’s left-to-right progress bar falls directly under a right-hand steering-wheel spoke—neither is a fatal flaw, but both scream phone app rather than GT cockpit.

Would probably make a sweet visualizer for a randomizer mode though. From…

LLMs haven’t rewritten the oldest rule in computing (or any tool, for that matter): garbage in, garbage out.

Got to hate finding errors/broken code immediately after sharing out my portfolio. Such is the cost of being my own maintainer.

Why can’t I rent a TV season? Subscribing for a single series or buying an entire season sight‑unseen is overkill.

• Give me a season-length rental cut stitched into one file.
  or
• Treat each episode like a mini movie rental. One watch, time limit once started.

(⌘ -) × 2

I swear I’m going to wear out that key combination from using it on every product/site these days to make it passably readable.

When you shipped, did you read it on a real screen—or did the mock‑ups and metrics say ‘good enough’?

EDIT: I see I’m not the only one feeling this way.

If Apple’s gearing up for another Snow Leopard moment (macOS Tahoe?), I’d love to see it go beyond under-the-hood refinements and embrace a real paradigm shift — one centered on productivity, window management, and collaboration. It’s time to reexamine the windowed, compartmentalized model we’ve relied on for decades and ask where software interaction is truly headed next.

Boy, the generated work on Sora sure has gotten… horny.

The best new game of 2025 is Sora. I find myself constantly coming back to try and create some weird idea or remix some of the fun stuff in the Explore feed.

When a voice assistant has high confidence (>95%) in understanding a request, it shouldn’t need to verbally confirm by repeating the entire command. A brief confirmation tone would be more efficient and less intrusive.

In case it isn’t obvious, I’ve finally gotten around to turning my notebook scribbles into proper posts.

The progress made with LLMs is impressive, but we’re still facing a fundamental issue: users must rethink how they communicate with AI systems, rather than AI accommodating natural human language.

Yes, we’ve moved beyond the rigid command structures of early voice assistants (“Hey Siri,” “Hey Google,” followed by carefully phrased requests), but the proliferation of prompt engineering guides and entire books on “how to talk to ChatGPT” reveals an uncomfortable truth—we’re still adapting to the machine, not the other way around.

This mirrors the early days of computing when users needed to learn command-line interfaces before graphical UIs made computers accessible to everyone. The true breakthrough in AI interfaces won’t be more powerful models, but systems that adapt to individual communication styles and quirks, meeting users where they are rather than where engineers wish them to be.

Until then, we’re still speaking a second language when talking to AI—just with a more forgiving grammar.

It’s gotten to be that working on this site is almost more fun than writing the actual posts.

Writing on my MacBook Pro with a Touch Bar has made me realize there might be an ideal fusion: a keyboard/trackpad that retains its speed, efficiency, and ergonomic benefits while also offering the intuitive, direct control of a touchscreen. Imagine merging the familiar feel of a keyboard with a secondary touch display—similar to the concepts behind the Nintendo DS or the iPhone’s all-touch interface—so that your fingers can immediately manipulate the UI as naturally as if you were handling physical controls.

Redesigning the blog has really reinvogorated my design to write and flesh out the write-ups in the project section.

Welcome to the new blog! 🎉
After way too long, I’ve gotten around to releasing this MVP of the redesigned portfolio site. Some stuff is still broken, and there is an entirely separate desktop version that is still under construction. I’m excited to reveal some of the redesigned project write-ups, but I didn’t want to delay the larger release any longer.

What's new:

• Separate mobile and desktop versions
• Simplified to a monopage design
• Sexy new color scheme
• Handling for post-types (links, projects, etc.)
• Project write-ups have been redesigned
• Added some sound effects
• Lots of small quality-of-life improvements

Nothing reassures me about my insurance provider quite like a headline that screams ‘phishing attempt’ (including a cheerful :D).

Truly, a masterclass in corporate communication.

All I want is to be able to pin previous conversations in the ChatGPT web-app. My current solution of WRITE THE KEYWORDS IN CAPS does the trick for now, but…

GitHub, if you could just go ahead and add an indication of what the system is doing here after I click “Index” that would be greaaat.

Happy Halloween! 🎃
Digging through my photos I found some old drawings, enjoy!

Got to love the random iOS beta bugs.

It’s puzzling that Apple hasn’t introduced a Books app for Apple TV. Our TVs have become the modern hearth, so why not recreate the experience of reading around the fireplace?

Imagine an Apple TV Books app that brings audiobooks to the big screen, turning stories into shared experiences. Families could gather to listen together, with synchronized visuals enhancing the narrative—perfect for kids’ books and interactive tales.

Even better, incorporating voice-to-text would let you enjoy any book audibly, leaving dynamic bookmarks so you can pick up right where you left off. It could also be a game-changer for education, making group discussions and interactive lessons more engaging.

Bringing Books to Apple TV could merge technology with tradition, creating a modern storytelling circle around our digital hearth.

Reminder: an MVP is supposed to show potential, not look like a warning label. Set the bar a bit higher.

Apple’s current approach to fullscreen apps often leaves users with a fragmented experience, especially when new windows are involved. It’s almost like that ‘forgetting why I entered the room’ effect—each time you’re forced to switch between spaces, it disrupts your focus and makes it harder to stay on task.

A more cohesive approach would be for the OS to support functionality that keeps new windows within the same fullscreen space. For instance, imagine an option to open new windows in a side panel, modal, or integrated split view within the existing fullscreen environment. The specifics aren’t as important as the need for a smoother, more intuitive way to manage windows in fullscreen mode. A redesigned experience like this would allow for better task continuity and a more productive workflow overall.

It’s been 17 years since the Apple TV was introduced and the way you control the Music app with the remote still barely makes sense.

Let’s talk about laggy UI, one of my new favorite pet peeves. You go to click, but a surprise pop-in makes you miss the target due to poor implementation. Now you’re facing a loading screen while the system processes, freezing all interaction. And just when you think you’re in the clear—you realize you have to undo the mistake and endure all those loading delays again.

Assuming, of course, you don’t get so frustrated that you repeat the entire ordeal thanks to that maddening interface.

Shout-out to the Tesla design team for once again proving they can make some of the ugliest cars on the road. It’s almost impressive how consistently they nail it.

The Apple Music iOS app should really have a landscape mode for when you want the speaks unobstructed, and the visual should look like a tiny boombox. Thank you.

This new FaceID per app feature in iOS should really be enabled by default for any of the communication apps (Messages, Phone, Email), since they not only provide an opportunity to onboard the user to the feature, those apps are the most damaging if a bad actor got your hands on your device*.

*Obviously this could be different person-to-person, but those three I would estimate everyone wants some control over the means by which we communicate to other people.

Whoever is doing AppleTV+’s show marketing should be replaced. There have now been multiple occasions where the promotion/information about a show in the guide has actively discouraged me from watching it, only for me to find, when giving it a shot randomly, that it’s actually a high-quality show.

They’re doing a disservice to the show’s creators.

Okay there are clearly some peaks and valleys in the OpenAI design, because this voice chat experience is pretty nice.

For as amazing as the technology of ChatGPT is, the UX of the actual app is utter dogshit.

Apple’s new Intelligence features claim to need advanced hardware, but do they really? Feels like we’re being nudged into upgrades when our older iPhones might be perfectly capable.

Design is entering a new era—customized, but not bespoke. The one-size-fits-all model of persona and pain point is more antiquated than I think most have realized.

ChatGPTV /ˈchatˌjēpēˈtēˈvē/
noun

1. The practice of watching television while simultaneously using ChatGPT as an on-demand commentary track.
2. A viewing experience where AI provides real-time insights about scenes, artistic choices, and cultural context.
   “I watched The Wire with ChatGPTV and learned so much about Baltimore in the 2000s.”

After all these years, how has the Apple Music team still not figured out a way to make it clear if you’re looking at the Library (local content) versus Apple Music?

Sometimes I honestly wonder what everyone is even doing at a company this large…They barely put out anything, and bugs/design tech persist for decades.

I might be part of an A/B test, but who thought removing star ratings from Amazon’s search results was a good idea? Star ratings are one of the main reasons I use the site. Stupid.

Designers who hide behind rigid processes and endless documentation stifle creativity and churn out uninspired designs that miss the mark.

In the last decade, we saw the rise of “Design Thinking” as a commodity—a checklist that anyone could follow to technically “do design.” This allowed many to enter the field without developing the deep, unspoken taste that defines great work. They climbed the ranks by enforcing these checklists: more research, more artifacts, more justification.

But process should be a scaffold, not a cage.

As the industry tightens, we are seeing a correction. The designers who survive and thrive won’t be the ones who can perfectly execute a double-diamond diagram; they will be the ones who can cut through the noise, make intuitive leaps, and ship work that matters. It’s time to value outcomes over artifacts.

Updated: January 30, 2026

Via Scott Jenson:

Most importantly, in 99% of cars on the road today, I don’t need to RTFM to turn steer, accelerate, brake, use the turn signals, or turn on the damn defroster. That’s why these things are standardized. There are lots of things I will likely need the manual for but not these basics. The v11 design broke this.

Standardization exists for a reason. When basics become complex (due to clearly baseless modifications), user experience suffers.

This doesn’t appear to be fixed in v12, FYI.

New states rolling out Apple Wallet supported drivers licenses makes me think there could be an interesting opportunity to have law enforcement register their phones to temporarily accept drivers licenses and insurance when requested during traffic stops. Could make the whole data transfer experience as painless as using a tap-to-pay kiosk.

If Apple is continuing to expand their iCloud services (things like iCloud Relay, Hide My Email, etc.), I’d love to see a native Calendly competitor built into the Calendar app / service.

Feels like a pretty natural fit since all of their other services are about quality of life improvements to using the internet and connecting with people.

Why is it that within the same app the AppleTV Library view is so much worse than the Show view? If I try to browse the episodes by going through the Library view, the UI is ironically worse for browsing through all the episodes. Meanwhile, if you go from the Search view or happen to see a card for the show from the Home page, it has season categories, additional info, etc.

???

design limbo /dəˈzīn ˈlimbō/
noun

1. The time between meetings when you can’t get any design work done.
2. A state of suspended productivity in which creative work is impossible due to frequent interruptions.
   “I’m stuck in design limbo until my 3 o’clock.”

If Apple doesn’t create an ad campaign out of today’s Crowdstrike mess it would be a real shame.

The dating app premium model (think HingeX, Tinder Gold, etc) is so lazy— it’s just about not hamstringing the experience by removing the profiles you would be actually interested in / removing the like restrictions to maintain daily/weekly/monthly usage numbers

Seems like the best thing they could offer would be a way to connect you with a dating coach who reviews your profile, helps you work on your conversation skills, etc. You could even flag that to potential dates so they know that this user is taking it more seriously.

I’d love to see what an Apple Card Titanium credit card would be like. Apple’s take on the ultra exclusive “black card” market. I’d sign up for something like that in a heartbeat if it included lots of travel perks / concierge that’s actually good / etc.

Hard skills become a little irrelevant in the world of GPTs.

• Turn off a bunch of extraneous DoorDash notifications
• Playing around the app
• DoorDash shows a modal suggesting that I might miss relevant updates
• Go back to notification settings
• All of them have been turned back on

Bunch of bullshit

The Apple Music “station from source” feature is pretty good, but what I’d really like to see is an option to “refine”. Sometimes defining the exact vibe of station you want takes more than just one data source.

Figma Config announced some new features today:

• UI3, a redesigned Figma
• Figma AI (Make Design, Make Prototype, Visual Search, Replace Content, Rename Layers)
• Figma Slides
• and some other stuff

Watching the CEO use Figma was peak “How do you do, fellow designers”

The iPhone Mirroring feature:

• Is great for that-one-app-that-is-only-on-mobile
• Introduces a new paradigm for showing / hiding the window controls, could use a little affordance but pretty slick
• Sort of makes me wonder why even show the home screen at all? You could probably get away with integrating the hardware to be recognized as native to the Mac and the apps alongside the native ones

Apple Maps should consider integrating an editor tool that empowers approved community members to update points of interest (POIs) and correct errors directly. Mapping services like OpenStreetMap already support this functionality, resulting in remarkable detail and accuracy contributed by community members.

The iOS 18 color customization could use some work.

Interesting how Apple redesigned the Settings app in iOS 18:

• Explainers at the header of all the major sections
• First party apps are now equally discoverable to Third party apps, since they’re all in the new “Apps” subcategory
• The seem to be developing a language where the background (blue versus grey background) of some of the sections seems to pertain to their controls

AI generated art fills that perfect niche of “stuff I used to throw together for fun in photoshop based off some stupid idea”

It looks like you’re writing a blog post.

Would you like help?

• So Microsoft re-announced Clippy after a 20-year hiatus
• It now has a voice and is called Copilot+ (Plus?)
• Makes for a nifty prerecorded demo
• Will be curious if they’ve learned from their mistakes

1. Yes, it really does work as well as those demo videos show.
2. It turns out all those recent smart assistant devices could just be an app! (Not to mention it has access to all the useful features a smartphone already has.)
3. It seems the stage is set for this to replace Siri. With first-party support for app and service integration, you have an opportunity for a very compelling new interaction paradigm.

I know I’m late to the commentary party, but who the hell at Apple saw that iPad crush ad and thought, “Yep, good to go”?

Super tone deaf, and the idea itself was totally salvageable if they had been a little more creative with the imagery.

Not to mention this exact idea has been done before.

Although the Oreo Dipper 9000 may seem like a silly use of GPT image generators, in product design, particularly during the initial stages, the utility of these tools cannot be overstated. They rapidly create preliminary visualizations of your concepts, enabling faster and more effective communication of your ideas. This tool also helps identify gaps in your thought process, as it fills in details you may not have considered, prompting a reevaluation of your approach.

Via The Register:

The advisor said that “it is a known issue in the Cybertruck that when you do a screen reset, instead of resetting in the standard two minutes, it takes five hours.”

I will never tire of hearing about this appliance-on-wheels’s woes.

The irony is not lost on The Atlantic, I suppose.

Looks like the reviews are coming out for the Humane Ai Pin, and the on-hand projection is as terrible as I would have expected when it was first announced.

I wonder if in all their design ideation they considered this Captain Disillusion video from seven years ago explaining exactly why this would be such a terrible idea?

It would be nice if the Crossfade feature in Apple Music worked when you manually change songs as well rather than just abruptly starting and stopping the music.

That’d also be an elegant solution to implement some AI-powered stem blending for that authentic DJ experience.

There’s an inexplicable satisfaction that comes with filling the pages of a design notebook and adding it to the stack of predecessors.

While I may never find the time to thoroughly read through each page, these notebooks serve as tangible reminders of the daily dedication poured into design work. In a world where digital products often fade into the ether, there’s a comforting permanence in holding something physical.

Figma please just make it so I can organize my Pages like every file structure system since the 90’s.

A small web pet peeve: email fields that try to auto correct names to be capitalized.

Every work email I’ve ever had is my name lowercase, and the autocorrect is way too aggressive in trying to capitalize, which then makes the validation fail if the website is strict about upper and lower case letters.

via CarsDirect:

Some people may wonder what the big deal is. Normal cars need to be washed and cleaned regularly. But, what makes the Cybertruck more unique than other vehicles on the road is that its body doesn’t have a clear coat. That means that any corrosive substances that come in contact with the body have to be cleaned immediately or they’ll heavily damage the stainless steel body.

Sounds like fun.

Maybe it’s coming in a future iteration of the Apple Vision Pro, but it’s strange that they stuck to the app paradigm for a device that seems to suggest it’d be a great persistent head-up display assistant:

• Always knows what you’re looking at, could reasonably overlay relevant information
• Speaking to Siri could automatically process whatever you’re looking at
• As we’ve seen from some of the early demos, window-based interfaces make sense for laptops / desktops because they’re stationary, that paradigm falls apart if people are moving too much (though having multiple apps placed in 3d space is an okay in-between solution)

So I saw this when I was signing into YouTube:

This has to be one of the most bizarre things to put on a such a prominent page: no link to a blog post about the redesign? No way to preview it yet? What the fuck is the point of this message?

At the very least fix your flex implementation:

I wonder if Apple has considered taking an approach to getting games on the platform similar to their strategy for getting AppleTV+ originals. Seems like a good way to harbor more developers and growing their gaming catalog.

We’re still in the early day of use cases for this thing, but paying $3500 for a very fancy / convenient monitor doesn’t seem like such a silly investment if you look at what the potentially of that actually is.

I’m obviously going to be biased for my own industry when I think of the most immediate applications, but I’m really curious what new interaction patterns can be created when working with creative tools. (A comparable example from mobile interfaces were things like shake to undo, overscrolling the top to trigger a refresh, pinch gestures, etc.)

Can definitely see Apple Vision Pro normalizing VR (as it previously had with other products). Went to see what the interest was like at my local store– huge crowds, and trying to schedule a demo showed that next available date as “unavailable”.

This would be a pretty solid redesign of the Magic Mouse if they add the multi-touch and optical sensor to this thing.

I noticed Apple Maps has been inaccurately directed me on a longer route home due to a one-way street misidentification. Discovered the error while driving, reported it, and it was recently fixed, saving 5 minutes every time I head that way.

It does make me wonder about how widespread errors are in Apple Maps data. I wonder if there would be a benefit in supporting user contributions to address such issues efficiently. Maybe some sort of opt-in feature for Maps capturing detailed data to enhance routing and updates?

Finally got full interactivity working on the home page. Entirely coded using ChatGPT, figure that. 🤖

Why is the button to view a Stack in the Finder (making the content more easily searchable, sortable, scannable, etc.) the last item in the grid?

If it were the first item, at least then the user could easily decide between the stack view or the Finder view, but as the last item you’re always forced to scroll through the entire list (in some cases, a VERY long list).

Hell, even better? Put it as a floating object fixed to top of the panel.

I’m starting to think there are enough posts on this blog that I should implement some filtering at the head of the page.

Why the hell doesn’t the Apple TV Music app have a visualizer?

Some thoughts after reading this great blog post from Columbia’s Stats blog:

Where we are today, Large Language Models (LLMs) have become skilled at mimicking human intuition— taking into consideration all of the individual’s (well, the LLM’s scraping of the internet, in this case) experiences and perceptions and providing heuristic responses to prompts.

What’s really exiting is as we move out of the nascent phase of LLM AI we can now attempt to recreate the higher level of human cognition: reasoning. The question now is which LLM AI product will be the one to realize that a large investment in bringing in psychologists will help them reach that goal first?

Whoever approved this as a solution should be fired, but I think MURAL is basically a Microsoft property by now meaning they’ll probably be promoted instead.

Though really, why does MURAL even exist when you can just use FigJam?

“Hey what symbol should we use to show a track is popular?”

“How about the universally accepted symbol for ‘New’ in a list view?”

“Perfect. And what should the user interaction be when you hover over it?”

“I dunno, how about the Favorite functionality?”

“Sounds good to me! Ship it!”

What the fuck

It’s even more offensive considering they already use “🔥 Trending” in the Maps app to show when a POI is being frequently viewed.

Considering how good iOS’s image-to-text processing is (especially compared to competitors), Apple Maps should be able to convert menus into standardized POI metadata.

• For those that require assistive devices to read a menu, they could just load the restaurant POI
• Keeps users who are interested in delivery in the Apple Maps app longer, since they don’t need to jump immediately to DoorDash to check the menu if a restaurant looks good
  • Eventually you should be able to order (via applet) directly from the Apple Maps POI card
• Assuming it’s easy for a restaurant owner to upload the menu, it incentivizes businesses to engage with / update Apple Maps content

“You know when you…”, the start to many a good design metaphor.

It’s always sobering to accidentally leave an adblocker off and visit a couple websites. They really are trying to cram ads into any available whitespace.

Updated the home page with a fun new simulation 🙂

Addendum: I thought about this a bit more, and while I still agree with my original sentiments, I figured I’d expand my thinking slightly. But, yes, I think the event was 100% “this could have been an email” territory.

The iPhone and Apple Watch incremental updates absolutely should have been a Newsroom press release.
Sending out announcements and building up expectations only to not deliver to those expectations erodes the positive sentiment people have generated towards Apple announcement events. If you do that too many times, nobody will take them seriously anymore.

The carbon neutral achievements are impressive, but they would have been better utilized in an ad campaign.
Average consumers don’t watch these keynotes. Sure, they get trickle-down information of what Apple released eventually, but you know what people do pay attention to? Apple ads. They have a very distinct style and are (almost) always effective at communicating the benefits of Apple product releases. If anything, having an ad campaign that Apple have revamped the materials of most of their accessories is compelling to get people into stores simple to see (and more importantly) touch the new materials.

Today’s Apple event might have been the first time I didn’t actively watch or follow the updates. When I went back to check what had been announced, I saw that there was nothing of particular significance. This felt like such a non-event that it made me genuinely wonder what these teams have been doing for an entire year.

Perhaps the iPhone is soon reaching the same point MacBook Pros did a few years ago, where a complete overhaul saved the line from being the joke had it become.

Finally got around to finishing the code for my portfolio page. It’s live now, and I’ll be adding projects there in the coming weeks.

Design pattern libraries could really super-charge their utility if they were used to propagate component-specific features across all the channels that component appears in.

Example: if you ensure that every video throughout your app is loaded in a common video component, any quality of life improvements or new features would be consistent everywhere.

Nothing accelerates burnout faster than bad management. You can be passionate about the craft, but a toxic culture will drain that battery faster than you can recharge it.

The danger is that burnout is often framed as a personal failure—“I didn’t have enough resilience.” In reality, it’s often a structural failure. In small startups, culture is maintained by proximity and shared mission. In large orgs, it’s maintained by policy.

When managers prioritize policy over people, they don’t just kill productivity; they kill the very passion that drove their team to join in the first place.

Updated: January 30, 2026

Even some basic filtering of the Favorites in Apple Maps would make a world of difference for searching

Notification toxicity is always a clear sign of non-designers trying to eke out some congratulatory metrics at the cost of brand perception and user experience.

The example that always comes to mind are DoorDash notifications. You would want to leave them on for what you can consider useful information (order status, delivery driver messages), but by doing so you get uninvited marketing spam piped directly to you.

This is exactly what I think of when people advocate for third-party App Stores on iOS. Instead of one consistent, straightforward purchasing experience, we get these shells that always require some additional bullshit to use.

The immediacy of DoorDash + Apple Maps results.

Some fun details:

• Star in the top corner to quickly add / remove a favorite
• If the restaurant closes soon, the directions icon is shown with an alert to tell the user they need to leave soon
• “Top Rated Nearby” is a smart category that checks the most common attributes the user filters against
• There is a small shadow / gradient to show that the list continues off the right edge of the screen

enshittification /enˈSHitəfiˈkāSH(ə)n/
verb

1. To enshittify.
2. The process by which a social media platform’s content and engagement is overwhelmed by its toxicity (either internally or externally focused).
3. How a platform dies.

Facebook, TikTok, Reddit, …

Is it even worth mentioning anything else when the Apple Vision Pro was announced today?

It really seems Apple did their homework on this one, especially as I read the more informed opinions online.

And as a designer, it’s super fun to have a new method by which you can solve problems!

So Microsoft released Fluent 2…

I’ll defer to this comment on Hacker News that sums it up nicely:

It’s too bad that Microsoft as an organization doesn’t care about good design. I don’t look at Satya Nadella and think of a man who has taste. And Microsoft doesn’t have a Chief Design Officer, as far as I know.

Instead, Microsoft has VPs. So there’s no one person at the helm saying, “This is the vision and where we’re heading.”

As a result, I suspect there are actual good designers at Microsoft trying to start movements from within, and those have bubbled up to what we see today as the progression of Microsoft’s design through Fluent from Metro and prior.

But because there’s no one at the helm, these efforts will always be isolated.

There will never be anyone saying, “Let’s carry these efforts across products and down to the UI.” “Let’s deprecate and discontinue all of these fragmented UI frameworks. Moving forward, Microsoft will only create UI using Fluent UI.”

Worse yet, even if someone tried, Microsoft has tried and failed again and again and again so why would you bother? It’s clear Microsoft’s UIs are shifting sand compared to Apple’s platforms or even Linux desktops!

via Variety:

As of Sunday, after 26 days of release, the animated video game adaptation, from Universal, Illumination and Nintendo, has grossed $490 million in North America and $532 million internationallly. It’s only the fifth movie of pandemic times to join the $1 billion club, following “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” “Top Gun: Maverick,” “Jurassic World Dominion” and “Avatar: The Way of Water.”

It is always remarkable reading through the reviews of films like this: super mid reviews, talk of plot holes, etc., yet they still manage to draw crowds in.

This disconnect between online noise and reality has really stopped being surprising at this point. You can see the same thing happen with major yearly releases of video games (Madden, FIFA, Call of Duty), where the reviewers will point out how the game is more of the same, does nothing special, isn’t worth the money, and yet those are always the top grossing games every year.

Just a small shout-out to News Minimalist, for giving me what I actually want out of a news aggregator: simple summaries of what happened today with the ability to see more.

Apple products have a remarkable tendency to survive the drops that seem like they would break them, only to completely shatter on a very minor looking fall. ⌚️

Finally updated my portfolio’s blog.

Hopefully that means fewer excuses for not writing.

via Jorge Arango:

Skillful action demands that you master the particulars. You can only do that if you pay attention to feedback.[…]

So you design with feedback. But you also design for feedback.

Shed the negative associations. Embrace feedback for what it is: core to skillful action and good design.

A nice reminder on a rainy morning.

Was playin’ around with the idea of how live activities might be used for live sports.