2026-06-12 22:31:08
One of the big problems with the glass redesign in OS 26 was that it was really optimized to look good when specific content was underneath it. This famously resulted in illegible text in buttons when complex content was behind it, and social media is full of examples of that. But the quieter problem was when there was nothing under them, they looked kind of dead. On macOS especially, Apple made these buttons stand out a bit from the background by placing an enormous drop shadow behind them as well, which I thought looked absolutely garish.
But the glass effect in OS 27 has a subtle change that I think goes a long way to making them feel better. At the top of this post, I have a comparison from my app, Yearly Run Goals, which has three buttons inside a single glass pill. In addition to getting a peek at some of the changes to SF symbols in the new update, you can also see that the glass element the buttons sit in has a subtly different look that I think looks really sharp.
I don't know if it really comes across in a screenshot like this, but when you're using the device, I think glass buttons feel a lot better on everything from my iPhone to my iPad to my Mac.
I mentioned the Mac specifically earlier, and let's take a look at Finder.
This is what the Finder toolbar looked like in OS 26, which is very low contrast and has again these garish background shadows that I think look really weird. Here's what the same thing looks like in OS 27.
It's still not the most contrasty thing you've ever seen, but Apple's made a couple of changes that I think help here. The enormous shadows are basically gone because the new button outline lets the buttons stand out a bit more from the background. Apple's also gone further by making the buttons use a solid black color rather than a gray, as they did in Tahoe.
It's a slightly different thing, but a related change that I very much welcome is that toolbars get a background in OS 27. Here's the mess you saw when scrolling in OS 26:
And here's what it looks like in OS 27:
Ah, visual structure…what a concept!
2026-06-12 06:00:00
As someone who has been covering this ecosystem for nearly twenty years, the biggest shift this year, and my single biggest takeaway from the keynote, was a fundamental change in how Apple presented their software updates.
For many years, WWDC keynotes followed a highly predictable format. After a brief introduction, Apple would put up title slides for each operating system and cover the changes specific to that individual platform. In recent years, that structure has started to feel a bit awkward. More and more, every major feature seems to make its way to every platform. As I have written about previously regarding the Mac-ification of iPadOS, these features now look and work almost exactly the same way regardless of the device. While a new feature might be demoed during the iOS segment of a keynote, there is a very good chance that it exists and functions identically on iPads and Macs as well.
This trend was ratcheted up a level last year when Apple introduced a major redesign that made every operating system look and feel virtually identical, tossing aside many of the visual elements that used to make them distinct. From that perspective, this year's move to simply talk about all software changes at once, while setting the expectation that they apply across all of their platforms, makes perfect sense.
You can see this strategy reflected on Apple's website. While you can technically still filter the preview pages by operating system, the individual pages are nearly identical, and the main page (apple.com/os 👀) talk about the "OS Overview". And honestly, I don't blame them. Over the past year, I've reverted to just saying OS 26 when talking about Apple's platforms.
My podcast co-host, Christopher Lawley, has pushed the idea that Apple is moving toward something like appleOS, a unified operating system that runs across phones, tablets, laptops, and desktops. I can already see some readers searching for the famous screenshot of Craig Federighi saying "no" to this concept (saved you a search), but I think the idea is less crazy by the day. I'm still skeptical this will happen anytime soon, but I think it's plain to see for anyone paying attention recently that the unique aspects of each platform are being reduced as the company normalizes UI and interactions across everything that it can.
I also can't not bring up the elephants about to enter the room this year, which are Macs that you can interact with like iPads and iPhones as big as iPads.
This brings me back to my most controversial prediction of 2026 so far, where I argued that the iPadOS name would eventually go away and both iPhones and iPads would simply run iOS. Of course, you can go to Apple's website today and see that iPadOS 27 is indeed a thing, so they are not killing the name this year. Still, I am not willing to admit defeat just yet.
If we look back at Apple's history, the operating system that iPads run has changed names several times. The first instance was notably just a year into the product's life cycle, as the original iPad shipped running iPhone OS. It was not until the following year that they renamed the operating system to iOS, which better aligned with the idea of software running across multiple device types.
If history repeats itself and they eventually make the move I expect, I think there is a chance that at next year's WWDC, Apple will announce this change and point to their updated hardware lineup, which again features iPhones as large as iPads and Macs that you can use with touch. We will have to see if this presentation format continues, but if they do make this name change next year, it is entirely possible they won't even mention it in the keynote. It might be something we only learn when we visit Apple's site afterward and notice the iPadOS section has quietly disappeared. There is definitely some smoke here, and while I am not entirely sure what it indicates, Apple is clearly de-emphasizing platform names and differences.
As one final note, I think the thing that made this WWDC feel a little flat for people like me is that the segment on software updates was incredibly short. Typically, we get an hour and a half of updates detailing all the usability improvements made to the platforms. This time, we got it all blended together in a single 11-minute segment.
I don't think the blending itself is a problem, but it was so brief that I felt like I didn't come out of the keynote knowing how my phone or Mac would actually feel different in daily use. As is tradition, Apple posted their Developer State of the Union shortly after the keynote ended, which dove into a bunch of technical details for developers. It almost made me wish they would also host a "State of the Union for Nerds," where they would spend another hour diving into all the little details, tweaks, and quality-of-life changes they made to their platforms. We lost that detailed exploration in the main keynote this year, and it would have been a lot of fun to have a dedicated space for those smaller updates.
2026-06-10 01:15:02
Apple's WWDC kicked off yesterday, and there is one update in particular that struck me, the Sidecar feature now lets you directly manipulate macOS with your finger. As you can see from the video, it's literally macOS's standard UI that's completely usable with a finger. Scroll views that are complete with physics like you'd expect, menus are usable, and yes, you can move and close windows. You can even pull to refresh views!
No "touch mode".
No toggle to iPadOS.
No Apple Pencil-only restriction.
No massively blown up UI.
It just works, if you will.
I feel like I've been writing variations on this for years at this point, but I genuinely think people have been overthinking how touch will work on Macs. I've been using macOS Golden Gate for a few hours, and if you didn't know it could be used with touch, you would never know that suddenly this UI supported touch.
2026-06-08 20:00:00
I'd actually forgotten about this, but the first thing I ever made that was in my "Quick" collection wasn't actually Quick Reviews, it was QuickPin! As I wrote in 2016, QuickPin was a Chrome extension that let you save links to Pinboard with a single click.
Honestly, I still think it's pretty good, and would use it today if I was using Pinboard.
2026-06-08 08:43:03
A new God of War game was announced recently, God of War: Laufey, which doesn't star series lead Kratos, it stars his dead wife Laufey, who passed away right before the start of the 2018 game. Of course, none of that matters, and this new game has you playing as A LADY, so a certain group of people must get angry about it.
A few things I'll hit on quickly: Laufey's looks (seriously) and the idea that "now all games have female protagonists".
First off, gamers are losing their minds that Laufey has been "ugified" for the game. I don't know man, here's a side by side of the voice actress (Deborah Ann Woll) next to the character.
Meanwhile, I'm not familiar with ENDYMIONtv, but he seems like a piece of work, but when you search for "God of War: Laufey" on YouTube, this video is the first result after the official trailer. In it, he raises something I see quite often among a certain class of insecure, weak men:
Unfortunately, the things people don't want to see more of, like female protagonists being pretty much everywhere, also runs a risk. What started off as a novel idea, it has now become annoying.
To be clear, he's saying the idea of female protagonists in video games is a "nove idea", which…okay…
But hey, let's look at the data! All these emotional children care about are "facts", right? Let's look at the data and see if female protagonists are "everywhere".
I used the Video Game Sales Wiki to find the top selling video games from 2020 through 2025, and then found the top 10 selling games each year without counting primarily multiplayer and sports games to get single player games, which this douchebag (sorry, I should hold my name calling until I've proved he's a sexist douchebag) is focused on.
In 2020, the top 10 single-played games were:
In 2021:
In 2022:
In 2023:
In 2024:
In 2025:
All in, this is the prevalence across the last 6 years:
In short, if you were an insecure dork like this guy, 70% of the big games released can be played as a male character, and 22% of the time he's forced to play as a woman. There is a saying, "When someone is accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression," and i think it appeals to this sort of person as well. Before Laufey was announced, he was already "suffering" through 1/5 games featuring a female-only protagonist, and he took that as "female protagonists being pretty much everywhere".
Here's my actual take: there are insecure, weak men out there who will find a reason to hate all women in leading roles. Maybe they don't look fuckable enough. Maybe they aren't the right race. Maybe there's something else they come up with, but there will always be something that offends them.
2026-06-07 22:00:00
Loupe is a simple new app for iOS that shows how many things native apps can see about you and your device, lots of which is available without requesting elevated permissions. It's a fun app, but what I love about it is how it shows the range of things that native apps have access to that web apps don't.
For what it's worth, the vast majority of apps could not care less about this data and don't use it (hey, that's me!), but there's this myth that Apple makes apps you install on your iPhone super private in a way the web isn't, but that's simply a gross oversimplification. There are different things that apps can see than websites, but it's still quite a bit of stuff. If you're curious to see what, install Loupe, and it will immediately tell you when you set up your phone, what apps you have installed, and even how many times you've used the clipboard…all before asking for a single permission.