2026-06-13 09:18:05
Anthropic: Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5
The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance.
Looking forward to the "don't let the government slow down innovation in AI" folks will say about this one. Probably nothing since their team is in charge.
2026-06-13 05:00:00
Devin Coldewey: Google's new logos are bad
Google really whiffed with the new logos for its “reimagination” of G Suite as Google Workspace, replacing icons that are familiar, recognizable, and in Gmail’s case iconic if you will, with little rainbow blobs that everyone will now struggle to tell apart in their tabs. Companies always talk loud and long about their design language and choices, so as an antidote I thought I’d just explain why these new ones are bad and probably won’t last.
This is an article from 2020 when Google last changed all of their icons, and this was the generally shared opinion. Basically, people didn't like them because they moved from distinct icons with their own brand colors and moved to this same 4-5 color scheme.
At the time, I really thought it was disappointing, and I wasn't alone. My primary concern is what was referenced in this article, which is that by making all of your icons the same colors, it makes it hard to visually distinguish them at a glance. They went from a system where you could tell by the shape and color, and removed the color differentiator. Especially in the context of someone who works in Google Apps in a browser and relies on browser tab favicons to navigate. This was a huge annoyance and has been for years.
However…
One of the most clear facts about software design is that familiarity is the most powerful thing. Whether something is good or bad, if people are used to it, they will rebel when it's changed. Yes, even those things they don't like at first; they'll be back a few later defending them to the death.
And that's where we find ourselves once again. Just six years later, Google has revamped the icons across most of their products, and they've gone back to distinct colors and shapes for each service they offer. Maybe you love them, maybe you hate them, but I think they are a huge step forward for usability. In my book, an icon has two jobs. The first is to be immediately identifiable, and the second is to be beautiful. I think that the previous set of icons failed in both regards.
I think these new ones succeed in being distinct, and the second part is in the eye of the beholder. For me, I think they look pretty nice, but I can understand why someone else might not love them. Either way, because they're more distinct, I think they're a step forward and you won't hear me complain about them.
2026-06-13 02:37:28
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.