2026-01-01 05:41:25
A look back at Apple’s 2025, with special guest Rene Ritchie.
Sponsored by:
2026-01-01 01:53:00
After posting a link to the Computer History Museum’s release of the Photoshop 1.0 source code last week, I spent some time paging through the original Photoshop manuals. I found a screenshot of the dialog box where you entered your serial number, and posted it to Mastodon, writing:
If you’re annoyed by something that is obviously wrong about this dialog box from Photoshop 1.0, you’re my type of person. (Even more so if, like me, you remember being annoyed by this at the time, when you were entering your cracked SN.)
What a lovely thread it generated, replete with screenshots from early versions of the HIG.
Sidenote: I would eat my hat if Alan Dye knew what was wrong and gross about this dialog box. This is exactly the sort of sweating the idiomatic usability details thing that has frequently been wrong in Apple software in the last decade. The response from Dye and those in his cohort would be, I’d wager, to roll their eyes with a “Who gives a shit what the UI guidelines were forty fucking years ago?” dismissal. Here’s the thing. Styles have changed as time has marched on. Technical capabilities — screen resolution, color — have marched on. But the fundamental idioms of good Macintosh UI design are timeless (and many of them ought to apply to Apple’s other platforms). These idioms are like grammar. Slang changes. Language forever moves forward. But many important idioms are so fundamental they do not change. Styles and technical advances have advanced over time in filmmaking and print design too, but the basic principles of good cinema and graphic layout are timeless. Only a fool dismisses the collective knowledge passed down by those who came before us.
2026-01-01 01:52:26
Matthew Walther, in an opinion piece last week for The New York Times (gift link):
MAGA’s internal culture has always rewarded theatrical confrontation over achievement. Boorishness commands attention, and boors mistake attention for leverage. Pseudo-martyrdom becomes an end in itself. Loyalty tests proliferate. Those who counsel de-escalation find themselves subject to denunciation; prudential disagreement is allowed to provide cover for rank bigotry. Partisans celebrate one another for exacerbating tensions even when exacerbation forecloses coalition building.
There is also a related problem: The Trumpist movement has generated a lunatic array of semiautonomous online subcultures that are largely indifferent to strategic considerations and immune from political consequences while still exercising influence over actors whose decisions are not so immune. The disappearance of the informal gate-keeping function once performed by conservative luminaries such as William F. Buckley Jr. is probably permanent. In the absence of such authority, informed argument exists alongside phony outrage, profiteering, self-aggrandizement and saying things for the hell of it. The result is not merely the radicalization that Mr. Buckley feared but a kind of omnidirectional incoherence.
“A kind of omnidirectional incoherence” is as perfect a description as I’ve seen regarding the whole Trumpist movement in this second administration.
2025-12-31 07:57:11
Emily Delaney, at McSweeney’s:
Okay, now you’re getting upset. You’re getting upset despite the fact that we have strict rules against getting upset at this Hertz location. But tell me, honestly, when you reserved a rental car through Hertz, you thought… what? That we were going to set aside a special little car just for you? Seriously? Oh my god.
(Via Kottke.)
2025-12-31 07:46:27
Jason Pargin is — well, to my tastes — a master of the TikTok video format. This one is so good, and ends with a mic-drop closing line.
2025-12-31 04:26:55
Ruffin Prevost, writing at The New York Times:
As everyone filed out, I repeated, in English, some of the priest’s comments to my guide, Keiko Hatada, who taught English for 30 years and has led custom tours of Tokyo for the past decade. I wanted to make sure I had understood things correctly.
I recounted the priest’s admonition to set aside unwholesome feelings of anger and greed, and work instead to show compassion and generosity, as well as his reminder that his temple was still accepting donations for those affected by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.
“You told me you didn’t speak Japanese,” my guide said, pleasantly surprised.
Beyond a few basic greetings and food terms, I don’t.
I wrote the following two years ago in my AirPods Pro 2 review:
The new AirPods Pro are the best single expression of Apple as a company today. Not the most important product, not the most complicated, not the most essential. But the one that exemplifies everything Apple is trying to do. They are simple, they are useful, and they offer features that most people use and want. Most people use headphones. A lot of people use them every day — in noisy environments. AirPods Pro are — for any scenario where big over-ear-style headphones are impractical — the best headphones in the world.
That was before Live Translation, a feature that until recently existed only in science fiction.
