Archive for June 2025

What Apple says: We’ve expanded our vision for Swift Assist
What Apple means: we screwed up we had to start over

rip all those AI tools that try to hook into Xcode

GPT in Xcode with assistants??!! That was one of my hoped-for things!!!

The ChatGPT integration in Xcode is ok. I guess. Visual Studio has a very similar feature and I haven’t found it helpful for anything once the complexity increases. It’s nifty for summarizing complex code that spans several classes - especially if you need to trace a certain path.
More broadly - I know that the market wants Apple to go after AI. But someone needs to still ship a basic functioning platform and maybe that should really be Apple’s focus and leave the AI to others.

Xcode’s integration with ChatGPT (and other models) this year is incredible, and surprisingly deep. It can pass your project files along, deeplink to specific lines and classes, and scrub back through a change history to see what it’s doing. Syntax errors/deprecation warnings in code will prompt you to pass the reins to ChatGPT in the sidebar to help you fix them up. You can also @-reference specific classes or files in your prompt to have their context included.

Max Seelemann:

Been trying Xcode 26's new Coding Assistant for production the past two days. Here’s a few observations…
It’s a good start. But this is it. Cursor’s Chats are much more capable, including regex searches and command line access. Hence, Xcode can’t commit.
Also Coding Assistant lacks the ability to get context. I know context in Cursor is not well done, but it makes prompting so much easier.
Also dunno what version of ChatGPT Apple is using, it’s horrible. It deletes code instead of fixing. And makes broken changes.
It’s great that we can plug into Claude. But anything beyond trivial requests quickly runs into throttling (“too many tokens per minute“). Never had this with Claude, so it must be fixable.

Thomas Ricouard:

People are asking me if I’ll go back to Xcode from Cursor. I’m back in it a bit, because it’s easier to work with the new stuff in there for now, but not really. Cursor + Claude Code is just so much better than anything else.

• • •

Looks like you can only use Xcode’s AI features when installing Tahoe on the internal SSD of your Apple silicon Mac.

Gui Rambo:

PSA: even though Apple Intelligence is not currently supported in virtual machines, third-party LLMs in Xcode work just fine if you set them up with an API key.

Don’t waste 5 hours trying to build apps with Xcode 26 in a VM.
It just doesn’t work.

• • •

Pedro:

See the biggest improvement in xcode 26: your incremental builds should hopefully be more reliable, and this lays the ground for remote caching down the line

Rob Napier:

I seriously think this is the first time in years and years that I could upgrade Xcode and not delete derived data and have it work.

• • •

Xcode looks silly in liquid glass. The design is distinctly non-pro.

Khaos Tian:

Wow Xcode 26… I’m not sure I can handle that UI 😩 Somehow it just feels so distracting with all the floating elements….

Wow. They really ruined Xcode Settings with v26.

This is unusable.

Everything is a million clicks away now.

Marcin Krzyzanowski:

Don’t follow Apple lead and do not, I beg you, do not make Settings like this.

Marcin Krzyzanowski:

yes, feels and works as broken as system settings

Sean Heber:

Why does the new Xcode settings panel look like System Settings? This is a step backward - it was System Settings that needed the redesign!

Casey Liss:

Oh I do not like this at all

huh

• • •

Oh no - the improved user icons got paired with a really bad Xcode icon :(

Michael Flarup:

I am sorry, Xcode.

Apple’s motivation for this is somewhat addressed in the WWDC icon design session. They recommend to avoid ‘complex illustration styles’ and remove finer details, preferring larger symbolic layers that let the glass material effects provide the sophistication.

• • •

Nice improvement in Xcode 26.

Show’s the #if that matches the #endif

Rosyna Keller:

Does anyone know how to get the full names back for open editors in Xcode 26? These series of the same icon are useless to me…

Ian:

I’m sorely missing the old way with editor tabs. All the keyboard shortcuts are missing (“⌥+click a file” to open in another pane, “⌥+⇧+click” to choose where to open the file). And editor grid mode seems to be totally missing? 💔

Gui Rambo:

Is there a way to have Xcode 26 not close the project on Command+W when I close the last opened tab? I keep accidentally closing projects because sometimes I just want to close all tabs 😅

Previously:

Update (2025-06-16): Dominik Hauser:

Next time someone tells me that one can build apps with SwiftUI, I’ll show them this[…]

Apple Intelligence Apple Software Announcement Artificial Intelligence C++ Programming Language ChatGPT Claude Instruments Localization Mac macOS 15 Sequoia macOS Tahoe 26 Objective-C Programming Swift Assist Swift Programming Language SwiftUI Virtualization WWDC Xcode

Xcode 26's ChatGPT integration does the job; I threw it at a little internal project I have to browse and lookup my old social media posts, and asked it to go through the project and add support for loading and showing the attached images inline in the table view, something I never bothered to do before, and it just… did it. It’s going to be so hard not to want to use this for all the boring, menial tasks I haven’t got the time to address

Dave DeLong:

It’s absolutely crazy to me that @swiftlang Package Traits were proposed over a year ago and publicly released months ago and no version of Xcode has ever supported actually using them, and #Xcode26 is currently on track to also ship without support.

5 Comments

Swift Marketing and Speed

Mishal Shah (Reddit):

Over the past few months, the website workgroup has been redesigning Swift.org. On behalf of the website workgroup, I’m pleased to announce that we have merged the initial changes.

Our goal with the site redesign has been to make Swift.org more approachable for newcomers to Swift, highlight the language’s technical strengths, and make it easy to get started. That led to a focus on the website’s appearance, improving the user experience, and emphasizing important features such as Swift’s multiplatform support.

jawbroken:

it’s unfortunate that the analytics script causing cmd-click to not open links in a new tab hasn’t been fixed in the redesign, something that has been an issue for at least 7 years. better luck next redesign, i guess

Swift.org:

Swift is the powerful, flexible, multiplatform programming language.

Fast. Expressive. Safe.

[…]

Swift is the only language that scales from embedded devices and kernels to apps and cloud infrastructure.

Nevin:

I’ve been using Swift and contributing to Swift Evolution for a decade, it is by far my favorite and most used programming language, and I am a huge fan.

Nonetheless, when I read those lines, my immediate reaction is “Wait, the, and the only? Are they saying that no other language does those things?”

Even if true, statements like that make me question the reliability of the narrator, and they come across as somewhat disparaging of other languages rather than just building up this one.

Overall, I like the new homepage, but some of the wording is a bit much, and I think it’s unnecessary. There’s no need to pretend it’s something it’s not. I felt the same way about some of the benchmarks used to tout Swift’s performance when it was first introduced.

Frank A. Krueger:

Swift String parsing is embarrassingly slow. I just converted code from String indices/SubStrings to Data indices/SubSequences (assuming UTF8, meh) and performance was 100x faster. Went from 8 minutes to parse an 80 MB file to 5 seconds.

(Also 5 seconds is stupidly slow. Even Python can parse the same file, with the same algorithm, in about 1 second.)

My experience is that Swift can be very fast. But, especially with strings and bridging, you have to be careful and measure because sometimes there are unexpected sources of slowness. Likewise, code using Data can really fly, but it can also get incredibly bogged down in safety checks if you don’t annotate your code such that Swift can statically prove exclusive access.

There were some important new String optimizations announced at WWDC.

David Smith:

Bridging non-ASCII NSMutableStrings from ObjC will be slower at the point of bridging, but the String produced as a result will be much faster.
One particular case this tradeoff can end up not paying off in is if you then bridge the resulting String back to ObjC. If you’re in that situation the recommendation is to not double-bridge strings if you can avoid it.

Previously:

iOS iOS 18 iOS 26 Mac macOS 15 Sequoia macOS Tahoe 26 Marketing Optimization Programming Swift Programming Language Web

2 Comments

Generated Transcripts in Pocket Casts

Pocket Casts:

With version 7.85, we’ve introduced Generated Transcripts, a powerful new feature that makes engaging with your favorite podcasts easier than ever. Available on both Android and iOS for our Plus and Patron members, this feature allows you to follow along with podcast conversations.
Podcasts are full of incredible insights, but sometimes you want to revisit a key moment without scrubbing through the entire episode. With Generated Transcripts, you can now read along, search for specific phrases, and quickly find key discussions—even if a show doesn’t have their own transcripts.

As with Apple’s offering, this happens on the server, so it doesn’t work with your own uploads. In fact, it’s only available for a subset of popular podcasts.

Steven Aquino:

Despite Marco Arment being a longtime friend, I switched from using his Overcast as my preferred podcast player to using the stock Apple Podcasts app on my iPhone and iMac. I did so largely because of the immense accessibility transcripts provide me; Apple announced support for transcripts a little over a year ago, which is when I made the decision to change over.

It looks like there were some APIs announced at WWDC that will make it possible for future versions of Overcast and other apps to generate transcripts on-device.

Accessibility Artificial Intelligence Audio Audio Hijack iOS iOS 18 iOS App Notes Pocket Casts Podcasts Swift Programming Language

I was watching the new speech transcription APIs video and looking at the example code. It doesn’t feel like an Apple API. They’ve always been very straightforward simple easy to use APIs for powerful features.

Now with all the Swift async sequences and the new 4 part API they have you have to setup and create helper objects you just need to “know” that’s how you create it 5 steps earlier than you’d think you need it.

The APIs are going the same way.

Adam Engst:

Notes does not perform identically across platforms, with the Mac version producing notably better results than the iPhone version. If you care about transcription accuracy, let a Notes recording on the iPhone sync to an Apple silicon Mac and transcribe it there.
[…]
Audio Hijack and MacWhisper support about 100 languages because they use Whisper. Notes, on the other hand, is currently limited to English.
[…]
Audio Hijack is more accurate than Notes, and transcription comes on top of numerous other audio recording capabilities. However, it doesn’t provide line breaks, and if accuracy is important to you, MacWhisper is a better choice.

Previously:

2 Comments

Thursday, June 12, 2025

Apple’s Spin on AI and iPadOS Multitasking

The Wall Street Journal (Mastodon, Mac Power Users Talk, Slashdot):

Apple’s AI rollout has been rocky, from Siri delays to underwhelming Apple Intelligence features. WSJ’s Joanna Stern sits down with software chief Craig Federighi and marketing head Greg Joswiak at WWDC 2025 in Cupertino to talk about the future of AI at Apple—and what the heck happened to that smarter Siri.

Stern asked the executives if Apple had a working version of the more personalized Siri when the company demonstrated the features during its WWDC 2024 keynote.
According to Federighi, it did.
“We were filming real working software, with a real large language model, with real semantic search, that’s what you saw,” said Federighi.
“There’s this narrative out there that it was demoware only,” added Joswiak. “No.”

Stern asked some tough questions. The Apple guys looked nervous. I thought they mostly gave reasonable answers, but of course they aren’t going to tell us what we really want to know. (What was going on internally that we ended up here? When will the features ship? What are they doing to fix Siri?)

I do want to call out that, in multiple interviews, they are kind of setting up strawmen to knock down. They keep saying that people say Apple is behind in AI because it doesn’t have its own chatbot. To me, Apple has been clear that it has a different strategy, and I think that strategy mostly makes sense. I have never heard someone wish for an Apple chatbot. The issue is that everyone can see that Apple seems behind in executing said strategy, both that features didn’t ship on time and that the ones that did ship don’t measure up to similar features from other companies.

Secondly, they seem to be trying to debunk John Gruber’s claim that Apple showed vaporware at the last WWDC. But Apple’s assertion that there was actual, working software doesn’t contradict anything Gruber wrote. He put it at level 0/4 because there wasn’t even a live demo, just a pre-packaged video. If it can’t be demoed to the media in a controlled setting, even calling it “demoware” would be charitable. Wikipedia says, “After Dyson’s article, the word ‘vaporware’ became popular among writers in the personal computer software industry as a way to describe products they believed took too long to be released after their first announcement.” Is that not exactly what happened here?

Russell Ivanovic:

“This narrative that is was vaporware is nonsense”. Craig Apple. My guy. You announced something that never shipped. You made ads for it. You tried to sell iPhones based on it. What’s the difference if you had it running internally or not. Still vaporware. Zero difference 🤣

From a user’s perspective, however, this is a distinction without a difference, relying almost entirely on the fuzzy boundary between software that works only for the purpose of a single filmed demo, and software that works so poorly as to effectively be the same. But putting this on the record will be important as Apple prepares to defend itself over allegations of false advertising. That is, I think, who this statement is for — not for me, you, the public at large — but for itself and, by extension, its shareholders.

The underlying message that they’re trying to convey in all these interviews is clear: calm down, this isn’t a big deal, you guys are being a little crazy. And that, in turn, aims to undercut all the reporting about the turmoil within Apple – for years at this point – that has led to the situation with Siri. Sorry, the situation which they’re implying is not a situation. Though, I don’t know, normally when a company shakes up an entire team, that tends to suggest some sort of situation. That, of course, is never mentioned. Nor would you expect Apple – of all companies – to talk openly and candidly about internal challenges. But that just adds to this general wafting smell in the air.
[…]
Guess what, Apple? A lot of other products from other companies that were labeled as “vaporwear” also existed internally at those companies in various states at various points.
[…]
And when Stern pushes them that even with the AI stuff that has shipped within the products, that she’s not really using any of it, Joz implies two things: first, that she might not even be aware that she’s using some of it, because it’s behind-the-scenes (I’m going to go ahead and guess she’s aware) and second, that while she may not be getting utility out of Apple’s AI tools, many others are – such as you know, himself. This is the new “you’re holding it wrong”.

I didn’t like that part, either. Of course, Stern was aware of that.

Tom’s Guide:

Apple’s Craig Federighi and Greg “Joz” Joswiak sit down with Mark from Tom’s Guide and Lance from @techradar to unpack some of WWDC 2025’s biggest reveals, and they don’t hold back. From the truth of the Siri reboot delay to Apple Intelligence’s bold vision and the surprise of iPadOS stealing the show, this interview covers it all.

Mark Spoonauer:

As it turns out, Apple was simultaneously working on two versions of underlying Siri architecture. V1 was used to build the initial Siri demos. But V2 was needed to deliver a complete solution to customers.
“We set about for months, making it work better and better across more app intents, better and better for doing search,” said Federighi. “But fundamentally, we found that the limitations of the V1 architecture weren’t getting us to the quality level that we knew our customers needed and expected.
“We realized that V1 architecture, we could push and push and put in more time, but if we tried to push that out in the state it was going to be in, it would not meet our customer expectations or Apple standards, and that we had to move to the V2 architecture.
“As soon as we realized that, and that was during the spring, we let the world know that we weren’t going to be able to put that out, and we were going to keep working on really shifting to the new architecture and releasing something.”

Even with the second-generation architecture, Federighi said that Apple is still working to perfect the Siri features. In the interview, Apple’s marketing chief Greg Joswiak confirmed that the “coming year” refers to 2026, so it is likely that the company is currently planning to launch the features as part of iOS 26.4 next spring.

I’ll just repeat that I have almost no interest in the next-generation Siri features. I just want Apple to make the basic stuff—announced back when Steve Jobs was still alive—fast and reliable. Apple never seems to talk about this, and nobody asks them.

Colin Devroe:

I have no ill will against Craig and Joz but man their interviews after this year’s WWDC are terrible. Almost as if they didn’t rehearse answers to the most predictable questions.
The right answer should be “We tried, we failed, we’re trying again. We will only ship great products, and if we’re late so be it. We will get it right. But did you see what we DID ship? It IS great. Let me show you…”

I think that’s pretty much what they did, actually.

Andrew Cunningham (MacRumors):

And after many incremental steps, including a big swing and partial miss with the buggy, limited Stage Manager interface a couple of years ago, Apple has finally responded to requests for Mac-like multitasking with a distinctly Mac-like interface, an improved file manager, and better support for running tasks in the background.
But if this move was so forehead-slappingly obvious, why did it take so long to get here? This is one of the questions we dug into when we sat down with Federighi and Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing Greg Joswiak for a post-keynote chat earlier this week.
[…]
“If you want to rewind all the way to the time we introduced Split View and Slide Over [in iOS 9], you have to start with the grounding that the iPad is a direct manipulation touch-first device,” Federighi told Ars. “It is a foundational requirement that if you touch the screen and start to move something, that it responds. Otherwise, the entire interaction model is broken—it’s a psychic break with your contract with the device.”
Mac users, Federighi said, were more tolerant of small latency on their devices because they were already manipulating apps on the screen indirectly, but the iPads of a decade or so ago “didn’t have the capacity to run an unlimited number of windowed apps with perfect responsiveness.”

Apple has said this before, and I don’t really get it. Apple has had windows that move with great responsiveness when dragged with the mouse for 25 years. Mac OS X 10.0’s system requirements were a PowerPC G3 processor and 128 MB of RAM. Stage Manager was initially introduced as requiring an M1 processor. Then Apple added support for A12 iPads. The new iPadOS 26 multitasking also works on A12 iPads, which were introduced in 2019. iPadOS 26 will, of course, be mainly used in 2026. There’s a bit of a gap there.

And, of course, “unlimited apps with perfect responsiveness” is a strawman that doesn’t exist on any system, iPad, macOS, or PC.

So, to me, it really seems more about Apple’s software architecture (note that macOS ran great on the A12 DTKs and didn’t need all of their RAM) or its unwillingness to consider a more traditional user interface than it is about hardware or a fundamental difference between touch and a mouse/trackpad. I just think that Apple has an attitude about the iPad being special and different from the Mac. This also came out when Spoonauer and Ulanoff asked for guidance about who should buy an iPad vs. a Mac. Federighi and Joswiak first said that one should buy both and resisted comparing the two platforms.

It was, of course, sarcasm. But he didn’t really land it. Because it was also a sort of strange acknowledgement that perhaps Apple should have just been doing things this way all along. Which is to say, like a Mac.
So why didn’t they until – checks calendar – some 15 years after Steve Jobs first sat down in the comfortable chair on stage with the device? Some of it, as Federighi talks about in this interview were technical limitations. The first several iterations of the iPad were certainly more akin, hardware-wise, to an iPhone and not a Mac – bust those “just a big iPhone” jokes out of cold storage. But clearly just as big of a part was that Apple really, really wanted the iPad to be a different type of device. Filling a space in between the iPhone and a Mac, just as Jobs envisioned.

Among my many frustrations with iPadOS is how, since its debut, it has aggressively kicked backgrounded apps out of memory, particularly older Safari tabs. This is because it only barely has virtual memory, and only then for specific tasks on some hardware.

Previously:

Update (2025-06-13): John Gruber (Mastodon):

But that Siri demo in last year’s keynote is almost like a series of screenshots. We never see Peterson speak to Siri and then watch the results come in. There’s not one single shot in the whole demo that shows one action leading to the next. It’s all cut together in an unusual way for Apple keynote demos. Go see for yourself at the 1h:22m mark.

I spoke this week, off the record, to multiple trusted sources in Apple’s software engineering group, and none of them ever saw an internal build of iOS that had this feature before last year’s keynote. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t such a build. But none of my sources ever saw one, and they don’t believe there was one, because they’re in positions where they believe that if there had been such a build, their teams would have had access to it. Most rank and file engineers within Apple do not believe that feature existed in an even vaguely functional state a year ago, and the first any of them ever heard of it was when they watched the keynote with the rest of us on the first day of WWDC last year.

[…]

Apple is sticking with the euphemism “in the coming year” for when we can expect to see these next-gen personalized Siri features. Gurman reported today that they’re shooting for next spring. I confirmed with Apple at WWDC that “in the coming year” means “in 2026”.

I would also like to know if the revised Siri architecture will be able to handle common basic tasks, or if that will take yet another fifteen years and a couple redesigns. It will be extremely funny if I can soon ask Siri when my mom’s flight arrives and it is able to find the information buried in some email or iMessage, but it still unable to stop the only active timer.

The full interview with Joanna Stern is now available.

Apple Intelligence Artificial Intelligence Craig Federighi Interview iOS Multitasking iPadOS iPadOS 26 Siri

In an interview this week with Swiss tech journalist Rafael Zeier, Apple’s software engineering chief Craig Federighi said that iPadOS 26's new Mac-like features strike a good balance between productivity and simplicity. He added that macOS is not optimized for touch-screens, although rumors suggest that might change one day.
“We want to retain all the simplicity of the iPad, but still allow iPad users who want to go deeper and further to push it at their own pace to doing more,” said Federighi, in a sit-down interview at Apple Park’s podcast studio. “I think with macOS, you’d lose what makes iPad iPad, which is the ultimate touch device. But there are lots of things the two platforms can learn from one another, and that’s where we’ve adapted our best ideas to each.”

19 Comments

Tuesday, June 10, 2025

Ending macOS Intel Support

Ernie Smith (via Hacker News):

And today, we learned that Apple is finally ending its 20-year run of Intel-based Macs.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that they gave the public one more year of new versions, along with the promise of potential security fixes, avoiding an uncomfortable rug-pull like the one that many PowerPC users experienced with Snow Leopard in 2009.

Andrew Cunningham (Hacker News):

Apple will provide additional security updates for Tahoe until fall 2028, two years after it is replaced with macOS 27.

[…]

Apple is also planning changes to Rosetta 2, the Intel-to-Arm app translation technology created to ease the transition between the Intel and Apple Silicon eras. Rosetta will continue to work as a general-purpose app translation tool in both macOS 26 and macOS 27.

But after that, Rosetta will be pared back and will only be available to a limited subset of apps—specifically, older games that rely on Intel-specific libraries but are no longer being actively maintained by their developers.

I don’t really understand this last bit. They’re going to keep shipping Intel versions of all the frameworks, but only certain chosen games can use them? Apple still maintains the code, it still takes up space on everyone’s Mac, but users don’t get to use it to run old apps? I could see Apple just killing Rosetta, and I could also see a case for fully supporting it for longer. This middle ground seems weird.

Miles Wolbe:

With Rosetta 2 support winding down, time to revisit backing up the installer for offline use. This update addresses batch downloading RosettaUpdateAuto.pkg for all macOS versions from 11 through 26 beta, comprising 472 files totaling just under 150MB.

Rosetta 2 itself has always been small, so the fact that it was a separate download seemed like a political or licensing decision. It’s the system frameworks that take up most of the space.

Previously:

Update (2025-06-11): Rich Trouton:

Apple has not described what will happen with Rosetta 2 beyond macOS 27, beyond stating that they will be keeping a subset of Rosetta functionality available to support certain Intel-based frameworks. The goal of the support for these not-yet specified Intel-based frameworks is to allow older unmaintained gaming titles to run on macOS past macOS 27.

Matt Sephton:

The just-announced Containerization stuff also uses Rosetta 2, potentially in their own data centres, so I can’t see them discontinuing it any time soon.

macOS Tahoe 26 Announced

Apple (preview, Hacker News, Reddit):

With the new design, iconic elements of macOS will feel more expressive, delightful, and personal while remaining instantly familiar, including the desktop, Dock, in-app navigation, and toolbars. Users can further personalize the experience with an updated Control Center and new color options for folders, app icons, and widgets. Continuity gets even better with the Phone app arriving on Mac, so users can access familiar features from iPhone — including Recents, Contacts, and Voicemails — and new ones like Call Screening and Hold Assist. And with Live Activities from iPhone, users can stay on top of things happening in real time, like an upcoming flight, right on their Mac. Spotlight gets its biggest update ever, allowing users to now directly execute hundreds of actions — like sending an email or creating a note — and take advantage of all-new browsing experiences to get to content faster.

[…]

The Dock, sidebars, and toolbars have been refined, bringing greater focus to a user’s content. The menu bar is now completely transparent, making the display feel even larger. There are more ways to customize what controls appear in the menu bar and Control Center, along with how they’re laid out. The new design also unlocks more personalization on the Mac. App icons come to life in light or dark appearances, colorful new light and dark tints, as well as an elegant new clear look. Users can also change the colors of folders and add a symbol or emoji to give them a unique identity.

[…]

Spotlight, the central place to search for things on Mac, makes finding what users are looking for easier than ever, and provides users with all-new ways to take action. During a search, all results — including files, folders, events, apps, messages, and more — are now listed together and ranked intelligently based on relevance to the user. New filtering options rapidly narrow searches to exactly what a user is looking for, like PDFs or Mail messages. Spotlight can also surface results for documents stored on third-party cloud drives. And when a user doesn’t know exactly what they’re searching for, Spotlight’s new browse views make it easy to scan through their apps, files, clipboard history, and more.

Users can now take hundreds of actions directly from Spotlight — like sending an email, creating a note, or playing a podcast — without jumping between apps. Users can take actions from both Apple apps and apps built by developers, because any app can provide actions to Spotlight using the App Intents API. Users can also run shortcuts and perform actions from the menu bar in the app they’re currently working in, all without lifting their hands off the keyboard. Spotlight learns from users’ routines across the system and surfaces personalized actions, such as sending a message to a colleague a user regularly talks to. Additionally, Spotlight introduces quick keys, which are short strings of characters that get users right to the action they’re looking for.

It looks like there are some good features here, but I really don’t like the new design. Most of it just looks ugly, particularly the toolbars and sidebars. You can still turn off much of the transparency (including the menu bar) with the accessibility setting, and this also makes the sidebars look better, but none of the settings seem to get rid of the huge shadows in the toolbars. The alerts are kind of a mess with a mix of different font sizes and a left-aligned layout that I guess is better than the narrow, iOS-inspired one, but I prefer the classic, wider design.

So is it macOS Tahoe, macOS 26, or macOS Tahoe 26, or macOS 26 Tahoe?

How do I install the macOS Taco beta on an empty APFS volume? Can I do that through Software Update?

I don’t see it in softwareupdate --list-full-installers

Mr. Macintosh has a link to the full installer. There’s no IPSW yet.

• • •

I guess the terrible Settings.app style UI is now the standard we should expect across macOS.

It was nice having dedicated desktop UI designs for a while. I guess now macOS lives on iOS and iPadOS leftovers?

The menu bar is now completely transparent. ARRGGGHHHH

Joachim:

Why is a completely transparent menu bar good on macOS? Didn’t we try this before 10-20 years ago and then dialed it back a lot again? Why would it work this time?

Why would you want this transparency???

And why are there icons for every built-in menu item?

It’s impossible to read the title of that Acorn window. In the keynote. We’re not even in the real world yet. They made macOS horrendous.

• • •

The (apparent) fixing of Spotlight and effective return of Quicksilver almost two decades later and in almost every respect including parameters and menu navigation. This is a huge win for power users and a long-overdue update to the macOS experience. That it took Apple this long to do it is a bit sad, but at least they appear to be doing it right.

Joachim:

Ok, using Spotlight to search through the menu items of an app (like the Help menu did for ages) is a great idea!

Guy English:

The Spotlight Command Line seems cool.

OK I’m calling it, built-in clipboard history is the official WWDC winner feature.

• • •

I feel like we just need to rip off the bandaid and go back to wide alerts. Stacking the image on top of the text isn’t helping here. (I’m not picking on the checkbox misalignment in since this is a beta.)

Ok these “Thing is running in the background, is that OK?” alerts in macOS Tahoe absolutely need to go lol

• • •

Josh Avraham:

On macOS Tahoe notarized apps are exempt from a first launch malware scan, making the launch incredibly fast 🚀

Josh Long:

Odd decision. Apple has been notarizing malware ever since notarizing became a thing.

I hope Apple at least gives an option to re-enable that safety feature (even if it’s just via a Terminal command) for users who want a more hardened macOS.

• • •

In #macOSTahoe, if your Mac app icons stick out of the squircle, they’re now put inside a gray squircle for you. You can no longer have elements stick out.
Truly the end of an era where you could have free-shaped icons. :(

I will miss having icons in the macOS dock that break out of the squircle though.
They still made the Mac feel special and distinct.

I really liked that, too, and I’m not happy about having to redo my icons again, after Apple specifically allowed this style before (and did it with their own apps).

• • •

John Siracusa:

New Finder icon: 🤮

Stephen Hackett (Hacker News):

Something jumped out at me in the macOS Tahoe segment of the WWDC keynote today: the Finder icon is reversed.

[…]

The Finder logo has changed over the years, but the dark side has been on the left forever.

I’m obviously joking about this being the biggest news of the day, but it really does feel just plain wrong to swap the dark/light sides. The Finder icon is more than an icon, it’s a logo, a brand.

Previously:

Update (2025-06-11): Tim Hardwick (ArsTechnica, MacStories, 9to5Mac):

Apple has announced macOS Tahoe 26 at WWDC 2025, introducing a striking visual redesign alongside expanded Apple Intelligence capabilities and new Continuity features that further integrate Mac and iPhone workflows.

Howard Oakley:

Although those Intel models will be able to use many of the new features in Tahoe, they continue to be unable to access any Apple Intelligence.

This means that Tahoe will continue to be a large Universal binary, and could in theory be supported by OCLP, although that’s likely to be more challenging.

macOS Tahoe does away with the Launchpad feature that’s designed to show you all of the apps on your Mac, instead replacing it with a new “Applications” interface that’s similar to the App Library on the iPhone and iPad.

Hartley Charlton:

Apple today announced the biggest-ever update to Spotlight in macOS, introducing context-aware actions, app integration via App Intents, and powerful new productivity features.

Tim Hardwick:

Now in the hands of developers, macOS Tahoe introduces a long list of new features – some were showcased at Apple’s WWDC keynote, while others were quietly added behind the scenes. We’ve rounded up a selection of smaller but still useful changes you’ll find in the update.

• • •

Big year for universal apps; Apple didn’t mention it, but the new Journal, Phone, and upgraded FaceTime apps in macOS 26 are all Mac Catalyst.

I’m not the only one questioning the continued value of tailoring my Mac Catalyst UIs to the Mac — Apple has thrown out its own NSToolbars too. It’s getting really hard to tell where the UIKit ends and the AppKit begins, throughout the OS.
The macOS and iPadOS system apps are so similar now in 26, it starts to raise the ugly question yet again of… why are you writing all this stuff twice?
Why are there two apps with completely different codebases that look the same and have basically the same functions, all over the OS. And why do you need four versions of a declarative framework to paper over the platform differences when there no longer are any meaningful platform differences? 😅

• • •

Yet seven years later at WWDC 2025, Apple’s plans appear more transparent than ever (yes, that’s a pun about Liquid Glass): the critics were correct that iOS and macOS are merging. The latest evidence of this merger is the appearance of app icons in the macOS 26 Tahoe developer beta. All Mac app icons are now forced into iOS-style squircles. This change affects not only Apple’s own apps but also third-party apps; if an app icon is not already a squircle, macOS automatically draws it inside a gray squircle.

John Siracusa calls this Squircle Jail.

The most bizarre phenomenon on Tahoe, though, is that newer app icons are automatically applied to older apps.

The Iconfactory:

We’re gonna miss breaking out of the box on macOS. All app icons will be the same squircle, and any app without updated resources gets put in a grey penalty box.

And yes… Apple will mess with your squircle icon for your Mac apps… I did not have this lighting effect around the top before.

Hot take on the macOS icons becoming full squircle
I really love Mac icons. I was super bummed when they all became circles. I thought the icon overflowing the squircle was at least a decent compromise.
But after working on a few apps that run on both iOS and Mac? I get it. It’s an annoying speed bump and the icon systems were completely different requiring completely different assets. Especially if you were doing modern iOS icons.
I can only imagine how much it annoyed less Mac focused devs.

• • •

Mr. Macintosh:

Finder evolution 1996-2025

Stephen Hackett:

Looks like Finder isn’t the only Mac application to see big icon changes in macOS Tahoe. Poor Otto had his arms, legs, and pipe taken away[…]

When I was designing the icon for iPhoto Library Manager (with the awesome @Iconfactory), which was inspired by the original Automator icon, the initial drafts had the robot looking straight toward the “camera”. Everyone I showed it to universally deemed it “creepy af”. As a result, both iPLM and PowerPhotos have the robot looking off center. Did Apple show this to any human beings?

The new Tahoe app icons are awful.

Here’s Preview.

QuickTime Player

TextEdit

Automator is just fucking scary.

[…]

Disk Utility

Thomas Clement:

Many Tahoe icons look blurry to me. Am I the only one?

• • •

Brent Simmons:

It occurs to me that Liquid Glass will make Electron apps on the Mac look far more different from native apps than they currently do — seems like it would be very difficult, to the point of not worth trying, to replicate LG in Electron.

So Apple has officially moved to left-aligned titles in titlebars. I don’t think they considered this would look awful (or broken) in About windows. lol

The transparency of the share sheet in Safari is ridiculous.

Why would anyone want this???

Notifications on Tahoe are FAR less legible if there’s anything behind them. (Sequoia version shown for comparison.)
(There appear to be no other UI changes to Mac notifications, so they remain clunky and finicky, too.)

Andrew Abernathy:

On macOS 26, high-contrast Settings and Finder (column mode)[…]

It really is hard to believe that someone is so blind to the evils of translucency that they have chosen THIS picture as a good example of what it brings to macOS.

I mean, the Forward and Backward buttons actually look like two buttons in two different states! That’s EXACTLY what makes translucency evil from a usability perspective.

Is this… a toolbar?

The toolbar icons feel like they’re on a different plane from everything else. They visibly sit in front of window content and headings. Apple said this redesign was about focus, minimising distraction and UI getting out of the way of content. Elements like this, over the top transparency and refraction do the precise opposite. It’s like they had a brief and they have the buzzwords but the Apple execs haven’t seen or understood the implementation.

Jonathan Wight:

The toolbar on Tahoe is just weird. it does weird things.
And all the content i can see below it just darkens and muddies the toolbar.
“sooty” or “dirty” is the only way to explain it. This is not usable content and it’s not attractive UI. It’s just mud.
Some of the weird behaviour bugs can be fixed of course but the liquid glass mud effect will be permanent and i’ll have to opt out of the default behaviour to make my toolbar at all usable.

The corner radius of every window on Tahoe. Ugh.

macOS 26 installed. Good grief. Finder is hideous at this point. The rounded windows are almost comical. But the worst bit is window toolbar buttons, which have an insane drop shadow that makes them the most visually prominent part of any window. Background windows look weird too, with odd shapes. I found you can at least bring back a menu bar background by turning off transparency (which is how I have my iMac).
Lots and lots of work to do. This cannot be how this will ship, otherwise YIKES.

Ezekiel Elin:

I do NOT like the menu bar changes on macOS. They feel like they’re spilling outside the window

Now that Apple has blurred the lines even more when it comes to layouts, such as no longer having a concrete divider between sidebars and the details view… interactions as simple as widening the sidebar now produce odd and unexpected behavior. Behavior that you wouldn’t get if you just had a hard line between the sidebar and the details view.
This is most noticeable in Music.
What is wrong with compartmentalization in layouts, Apple?!

Some of the Small and Mini controls in AppKit have been made taller in #macOSTahoe which unfortunately make Xcode 26 a bit more annoying to use on 14" MacBook Pros. The UI is bigger and bolder which means less space for your code editor. I have both sidebars as thin as they can be without collapsing.

The Mac was always great (before) because it embraced UI density.

I want to make my pixels work for me -- not the white space you think the app should have.

Nathan Manceaux-Panot:

Wait, they’ve updated the mouse cursor! In macOS!
This is the first time they’ve changed it since the Retina transition in 2018, or arguably since the first Mac OS X itself, 24 years ago. Dang!

I really want to believe Apple is still going to improve the macOS liquid glass UI a lot before shipping. Because I installed the beta and it looks even worse than it seemed on the keynote. The sidebar looks like another window, and is much more prominent than the window content, and those toolbars are god damn awful. I see round rects everywhere not just distracting me from the content, but it’s even hard to tell windows and window sections apart. What a mess.

Update (2025-06-12): Mario Guzmán:

I knew there was something oddly familiar about the new Finder. I’m sure this was not intentional but the flattened the forehead and mouth parts so they reminded me a lot about the icons in Users & Groups in System 7-Mac OS 8/9-ish time frames.

I don’t like the new Finder icon, but not for reasons you’d think. It’s a decent, modern interpretation.
I haven’t liked the Finder since 2014 when they gave it the brighter colors in OS X Yosemite. It just didn’t feel like Finder anymore.

Update (2025-06-13): Craig Hockenberry:

If you’re considering moving to macOS 26 on a machine that you use full-time, try moving tabs around in Safari for a few minutes.
It’s totally unpredictable and was a deal killer for me.

I think we all know that SF Symbols just don’t work well on non-retina displays… they’re always so blurry, not pixel-aligned, and sometimes appear squished.
A standard screenshot on 1x and the same but zoomed. It would be nice if you could provide 1x pngs as fallbacks at least in order to avoid this problem on 1x displays.
We’re now seeing more little icons in #macOSTahoe

Howard Oakley:

There are two fundamental rules provided by Apple:

In compiled languages, the version returned by macOS depends on the SDK which the software has been built against. When built against the 15 SDK or earlier, Tahoe returns 16 for compatibility with previous numbering and all existing apps; when built against the 26.0 SDK, it returns 26.0 for forward compatibility.

In scripted languages run within a shell environment, there’s an environmental variable to control the version number given. Set SYSTEM_VERSION_COMPAT=1 and Tahoe returns 16; leave that variable unset, or SYSTEM_VERSION_COMPAT=0, and it returns 26.

I find it really difficult to understand how Apple thinks this is good design. A friend pointed out that it’s designed for dark mode; he’s right. There are no shadows in dark mode as they are in light mode, where the shadows make it ugly. This also makes me want a grey theme on macOS.

Anyway, Music on macOS is nearly impossible to see -- so this was the feedback I sent.

Update (2025-06-16): Tim Hardwick:

Apple’s Terminal app is getting a visual refresh in macOS Tahoe, and it’s the first notable design update since the command-line tool debuted.

Is it just me or is Finder significantly faster at browsing folders of tens of thousands of items like images now in macOS 26?

Now, it seems from this video that improvements have been made — see the demos at 8:21, 11:09, and 15:27. [Writing Tools] still does not seem to show the difference after using Rewrite as changes are made in-place, but at least it is no longer using a popover.

I think I’ve found the biggest problem with “liquid glass,” which Apple doesn’t seem to understand. In default view, buttons floating above windows distract the eye from what I’m looking it. In the Finder, as here, it’s not a big deal, but in a productivity app with lots of buttons, it distracts.

The wallpaper shines through the sidebar, but the sidebar floats — clearly inset — on top of a solid colour app window.
So where does the sidebar background colour from? It’s illogical.

In Big Sur, one thing that bugged me about the new full-height sidebars & inspector sidebars is that they took so much real-estate from toolbars.
Now with chonkier controls everywhere and in toolbars with #macOSTahoe, everything just feels more cluttered on my 14" MacBook Pro.
As you make windows smaller, toolbar controls prematurely get thrown into an overflow menu. I have to remove buttons just to make it more usable these days.
Very dense UI on the Desktop is not a bad thing.

I know, I keep coming back to this. And this isn’t about Liquid Glass…
I think we’re in this awful state of layouts because of full-height sidebars and compressing the title bar into the toolbar.
Full-height sidebars do not aid in anything. They just serve to eat more of your toolbar space. When you mix that with combining the toolbar with the titlebar -- well you end up with no space at all…
I think this forced Apple Design to moving player controls to the bottom.

Francisco Tolmasky:

One of the reasons the “iOS-ification” of macOS UI suffers so greatly is that iOS is fundamentally a single-window UI. It literally doesn’t have to contend with any of the issues that most Desktop chrome was designed to address. So of course it falls flat on its face when applied to macOS. Imagine if every year Apple tried to make iOS as “simple” as watchOS, with no regard for functionality, just stubbornly insisting “if we don’t need it on the watch, we shouldn’t need it on the iPhone!”

And recall that SwiftUI was first developed for watchOS.

App Intents Apple Event Apple Intelligence Apple Software Announcement Catalyst (Marzipan) Continuity Control Center Icons Journal Launchpad Live Activities Mac macOS Release macOS Tahoe 26 Notarization Pasteboard Phone.app Shortcuts Spotlight Terminal Writing Tools WWDC

The Tahoe menu item icons are a distraction. They hurt rather than help, because now you have to look at two different types of things—words and icons—rather than just one. Which should you focus on? It just slows you down.
And some of those icons are meaningless, not to mention too small to parse. Compress? The Rename icon actually signifies “edit”. The distinction between the Open and Make Alias icons are never going to make sense to the user. Not to mention Copy and Duplicate.

Manton Reece:

The left-aligned text for alerts in macOS Tahoe is such a welcome improvement. Apple just needs to center the icon and it’ll be good.

20 Comments

iOS 26 Announced

Apple (preview):

On the Lock Screen, the time fluidly adapts to the available space in an image, and spatial scenes bring wallpapers to life with a 3D effect when users move iPhone. Updated design elements also deliver fresh experiences in apps. A simplified, streamlined Camera layout helps users keep their attention on the moment they’re capturing, and the Photos app is updated to feature separate tabs for Library and Collections views. In Safari, web pages flow from the top edge to the bottom of the screen, enabling users to see more of the page while maintaining access to frequently used actions like refresh and search. In Apple Music, News, and Podcasts, the tab bar is redesigned to float above users’ content, dynamically shrink when users are browsing to put content front and center, and then expand when they scroll back up.

[…]

Live Translation is integrated into Messages, FaceTime, and Phone to help users communicate across languages, translating text and audio on the fly.

[…]

Fundamental to the iPhone experience, the Phone app now offers a unified layout that combines Favorites, Recents, and Voicemails all in one place. Call Screening builds on Live Voicemail and helps eliminate interruptions by gathering information from the caller and giving users the details they need to decide if they want to pick up or ignore the call. And for the times when a user is stuck on hold, Hold Assist notifies the user when a live agent is available.

In Messages, users can now screen messages from unknown senders, giving them more control over who appears in their conversation list. Messages from unknown senders will appear in a dedicated folder where users can then mark the number as known, ask for more information, or delete. These messages will remain silenced until a user accepts them.

I’m not crazy about Liquid Glass—especially the transparency and floating toolbar—but I’m intrigued by the new Camera and CarPlay stuff, and it looks like there’s a solid list of new Phone and Messages features that will actually be useful.

That iMessage interface looks horrible, I can barely read the messages.

So the purpose of Messages backgrounds is… to make the messages hard to read, I have to assume.

I’d like to… opt out of iMessage backgrounds please

Oh god you can just unilaterally change chat backgrounds? If you do this to my chats I will block you

• • •

Oh my at the Home Screen with glass icons. Why not just make everything fully transparent, so you can’t read anything at all.

I can only assume someone set fire to the HIG.

They just made the HIG transparent so that nobody can read it anymore.

Am I the only one who thinks this new iOS design looks horrible.

That concept post from a week or two ago was actually quite pretty and useable.

This looks like a poorly thought through concept from a sci-fi film that didn’t have enough time.

Thomas Cannon:

The truly astounding part of WWDC is that they made my nostalgic for iOS 7.0’s readability.

Simon B. Støvring:

iOS 7: I DON’T KNOW IF THIS IS A BUTTON

iOS 26: I CAN’T READ THE TEXT

Liquid Glass seems nice and cool -- but it really seems like the transparency will make everything difficult to read.
Is there enough contrast? I can’t tell…
But honestly, I’m happy that buttons seem to look like buttons again. That’s really great.

Kaveh:

Genuinely curious why anyone on Apple’s design team thinks this looks like good UX

JFC Apple. This is outrageous. Does no-one at Apple care about legibility anymore?

iOS 26 is going to be an absolute nightmare for anyone with a vestibular disorder or who has issues with legibility/contrast. There is no way in hell Apple will have tested most of this with Reduce Motion. (There are still major problems with last year’s stuff, let alone this.)

Bruno Rocha:

Happy with the new iOS redesign. Although not as crazy as the 2000s era design, finally we have something that is actually kind of fun and not some usability-focused sterile and boring slop

Adam Overholtzer:

The Phone app’s tab bar is an unreadable mess in the Keynote where they’ve tried to make everything unrealistically beautiful. 🤦🏻‍♂️

The reason actions were at the bottom was because phones are tall and you can use the sheet one handed. Now not so much. =(

Steven Curtis:

It’s the news that alerts will no longer take over the whole screen.

Ryan Jones:

15 GB holy hell

Previously:

Update (2025-06-11): Tim Hardwick:

To make things easier in iOS 26, you no longer have to start the rightward swipe at the very edge of the screen. Now you can start the gesture from anywhere, like the middle of the display. Providing you’re not thumbing an interactive UI element, the swipe-to-go-back gesture will still be triggered.

Tim Hardwick:

Apple’s first iOS 26 beta includes a new “Keep Audio in Headphones” setting that addresses a common frustration for iPhone users juggling multiple audio devices.

In iOS 26, Apple updated the Battery section of the Settings app to provide a much more in-depth look at how your iPhone usage impacts battery life and how much battery apps are draining, plus there are new battery management tools.

Tim Hardwick:

Apple in iOS 26 has introduced a third display appearance option called “Clear Look,” expanding beyond the traditional Light and Dark Mode choices that have defined the iPhone experience in recent iOS versions.

iOS 26 allows users to set custom backgrounds in conversations, and it introduces the ability to create polls for voting.

In the Messages app, users can now screen messages from unknown senders. Apple says messages from unknown senders will appear in a dedicated folder, where users can mark the phone number as known, ask for more information, or delete it. These messages will remain silenced until a user accepts them.

We’ve rounded up some of the smaller changes but still useful changes that have been introduced in the update.

Rebecca Owen:

the thicker List items are going to take a little getting used to (admittedly I haven’t tried this on a real device yet)

Interesting to see the search bar moved to the bottom

Sean Heber:

They say the new UI is supposed to allow you to see more content, but at the same time it feels like all the UI has gotten bigger so... I don’t know if that claim is gonna hold up. 😛

A hallmark of iOS 26 design seems to be the consolidation of what was previously multiple toolbar buttons into a “…” button that shows a menu.

Update (2025-06-13): Craig Grannell:

Often, though, it’s smaller changes that can make or break an operating system. And one change has me doing a happy dance: the Home indicator no longer scythes across the bottom of the screen, above the app you’re using. I’ve grumbled about the Home indicator for years. I wanted an off switch – the means to get rid of it for good. Because the last thing I need when playing a game, using a music app, or reading, is a distracting line lurking at the bottom of the screen.
In the ’26’ dev betas, Apple hasn’t provided an off switch in Settings, but it has introduced the next best thing. Actually, it’s arguably created something better. When you switch to an app, the Home indicator now elegantly fades. Further interaction with the app doesn’t make it reappear. Instead, you have to make a deliberate upwards swipe from the bottom of the screen to bring it back.

Aaron Pearce:

Fun fact… Liquid Glass seems to always pull from List contents for the background, not whats actually below it?

Update (2025-06-16): Juli Clover:

Visual Intelligence, an Apple Intelligence feature that Apple introduced last year, has some new capabilities in iOS 26 that make it more useful and better able to compete with the functionality available through some Android smartphones.

Apple Event Apple Intelligence Apple Software Announcement Camera CarPlay Genmoji Image Playground iOS iOS 26 iOS Release Lock Screen Messages.app Natural Language Translation Phone.app Photos.app WWDC

“Depending on the amount of free space available, iOS might dynamically reserve update space for Automatic Updates to download and install successfully,” says Apple’s release notes for the first iOS 26 developer beta.

Niki Tonsky:

I always imagined that it’s the center of the thumb that points to slider position. Turned out Apple has different idea

Ged Maheux:

I know I have aging eyes but the more I look at Liquid Glass app icons the fuzzier they get. The subtle glass bezels, reflected edge highlights and soft chromatic shadows result in an icon that is super soft and fuzzy at size.
Because the soft, chromatic shadows generally can’t be seen against iOS 26’s near black backgrounds, Liquid Glass icons actually look crisper when viewed in Dark Mode. Might be a partial workaround for those of you out there with sensitive eyes. I think it goes without saying that this is a basic design flaw.
[…]
My ability to easily descern which tab in Safari is selected in iOS 26 should in no way, shape or form be dependent on the colors of the underlying webpage. The selected tab should ALWAYS be properly highlighted. Apple should take a cue from the selected state in Mail and throw this design reasoning out the window for the sake of usability.

8 Comments

iPadOS 26 Announced

Apple (preview, Slashdot):

While maintaining the simplicity of iPad, iPadOS 26 introduces an entirely new powerful and intuitive windowing system with new features that help users control, organize, and switch between apps. Apple Intelligence becomes even more capable and integrated across iPadOS 26, with new features that help users communicate, express themselves, and get things done, including Live Translation, new ways to create with Genmoji and Image Playground, and intelligent actions with Shortcuts. The supercharged Files app offers new ways to organize files and customize folders. And with Folders in the dock, users can conveniently access downloads, documents, and more from anywhere. The Preview app comes to iPad, giving users a dedicated app to view and edit PDFs, with powerful features like Apple Pencil Markup and AutoFill built in. And with Background Tasks, audio input selection, and Local capture, iPadOS 26 unlocks new capabilities for creative pros working with audio and video.

[…]

The new windowing system lets users fluidly resize app windows, place them exactly where they want, and open even more windows at once.

Familiar window controls allow users to seamlessly close, minimize, resize, or tile their windows. Window tiling is designed for the unique capabilities of iPad, and enables users to arrange their windows with a simple flick. If a user previously resized an app, it opens back in the exact same size and position when they open it again. With Exposé, users can quickly see all their open windows spread out, helping them easily switch to the one they need.

[…]

With a new menu bar, users can access the commands available in an app with a simple swipe down from the top of the display, or by moving their cursor to the top. Users can quickly find a specific feature or related tips in an app by using search in the menu bar.

Did they finally nail iPadOS multitasking? I haven’t tried it yet, but based on the demo this is the most optimistic I’ve been about iPadOS in a long time. I kind of don’t know whether to be happy that they did the obvious things people have been asking for or upset that so much time was wasted failing to reinvent the wheel. This reminds me of the quest to get rid of the file system, where they also essentially admitted that they didn’t actually have a better idea. There are still three separate modes (windowing, full screen, and Stage Manager), like on the Mac, but I guess that’s OK.

The iPad’s (creeping) convergence towards macOS, which is something regular people will value highly. Although we are not getting hypervisor support (or any sort of terminal), at least Stage Manager is now an option and not the default, and windows behave in a mostly sane way (including a proper tiling mode).

Hot take on iPadOS 26: they… did it? They fixed windowing and multitasking?

… all these years of aborted multitasking and the answer was just to make a cursor and windows with Expose????????? All of that nonsense for no reason????

“We held the iPad back for years and are now turning the iPad into a Mac. We hope you’re fucking happy now.” – Craig F.

John Siracusa:

Turns out the Mac had some pretty good ideas when it comes to multitasking.

Brent Simmons:

On the iPadOS changes — it’s as if Apple suddenly realized that Mac is pretty fucking good and a great model for the future of computing.

Arbitrarily resizable and overlapping windows with close, minimize, and full screen buttons on iPad!?
Can’t innovate anymore my ass!
OK at least Craig gave the snarky wink and nod at just copying the Mac after 15 years of dead ends on the iPad.

Peter Witham:

IMO this years winner is iPadOS 26 with multitasking that we always wanted.

Is iPadOS 26 going to finally solve the windowing system?

Dave Mark:

I am a fan of the new windowing scheme for iPadOS 26.

Definitely brings me back to the early days when the Mac first got the ability to handle multiple windows. A game changer then, certainly a step up today.

Really like the addition of Exposé. Very Mac-like.

Manton Reece:

iPad windowing looks good. Funny we were so worried the Mac would become too much like iOS, but sort of the opposite has happened to the iPad over the years. Files app also becoming a little more like the Finder.

Kuba Suder:

And Preview app! And better background tasks!
Man, they’re gonna sell sooo many M5 iPad Pros

Maybe it’s not so bad when seen on device & in person, but from this screenshot iPadOS’ new tool-/title-/sidebar look really pains my eye. At just a blink I see:
the radius of sidebar and window don’t match
the small traffic light icons just look really off next to the show/hide toolbar icon
that icon itself also looks off next to the free-floating toolbar icons

Riley Testut :

They actually did it!! They added traffic controls to windows!!

Riccardo Mori:

These look like “More…” menus, but they’re actually semaphore controls for each window. facepalm

Come on.

This looks way better than their previous attempts at a window multitasking UI on iPad. It feels like a cohesive system rather than a bunch of separate systems that can layer on top of each other.

So here’s a thing: I liked the original iPad windowing system. Split View. Slide Over. It worked. It was simple. What I also wanted was better external display support. But Apple pushed back against that for years, crapped out Stage Manager, and now we’ve got baby macOS on iPad. Not sure how this will play out.

Legitimately great iPadOS update leaning into complexity without oversimplifying. Real windowing, a menu bar, great tools for files. Might have to get an iPad again.

Ethan J. A. Schoonover:

I’m sure these are all documented nicely somewhere and maybe this was around before, but THE GESTURE you want on iPadOS26 is double-tap on the top of the window to jump back and forth between window mode and full screen.

Previously:

Update (2025-06-11): Hartley Charlton:

The centerpiece of the multitasking improvements is a new macOS-style windowing system. Apps still launch in full-screen by default, preserving the familiar iPad experience, but users can now resize apps into windows using a new grab handle. If an app was previously used in a windowed state, it will remember that layout and reopen the same way next time.
Intuitive window tiling allows users to simply flick a window toward the edge of the screen to automatically tile it into place. To make managing multiple apps easier, Expose—a feature familiar to Mac users—comes to iPad , offering a clear overview of all open windows, allowing quick switching.

The more I use iPadOS 26, the more I wish the window traffic lights were just visible all the time in their maximized state. Make it so that I have to design my app around them, sure, but just stop hiding them. They’re fine, they make it easier to use, and having to tap them twice every time gets annoying fast

Ethan J. A. Schoonover:

On iPadOS 26 the red close button now FULLY closes an app & the yellow just backgrounds it.
This is weird in situations like Music where the red button on macOS just backgrounds the app (expected, desired). Even more weird is that iPad ctrl-W behavior is now “red button” matched, killing Music.

The limit is 12, on an M4 iPad. Further windows get pushed into the recents carousel instead, but they return at the saved window size when you tap them

Some of my criticism of Stage Manager was that there were no APIs, and iPad ignored all the window management APIs that UIKit did have for Mac/visionOS — like sizing & positioning windows, setting their frame limits, click-to-drag, etc.
iPadOS 26 appears to make no changes in that regard; there are no APIs for these or any of the new windowing features. You cannot programmatically place or resize a window, or make auxiliary panels. And the systemwide ‘new window’ button is still non-negotiable.

Good and bad news after watching “Finish tasks in the background”:
The good: unlike what I initially believed after watching the keynote, the new background capabilities also come to iOS.
The bad: if you were hoping that iPadOS now supports permanently running background tasks, you’ll be disappointed. It’s now easier to continue user-initiated, longer running tasks in the background - but they need to come to an end eventually - or will be killed.

Casey Liss:

Really fascinating conversation with Federighi about the technical limitations/motivations behind the many many cuts at iPadOS multitasking.

Apple Event Apple Software Announcement Dock Files.app iOS Multitasking iPadOS iPadOS Release Journal Preview.app Stage Manager WWDC

These new tab bars sure are something. I imagine the opacity is going to change dramatically over the beta period. And these pure black glyphs probably will get some glass effect instead.

Update (2025-06-16): Kuba Suder:

Hmm… so I guess this won’t (easily) solve the “keep an SSH client session open in the background” problem…

7 Comments

watchOS 26 Announced

Apple (preview):

A new design with Liquid Glass makes features like the Smart Stack, Control Center, the Photos watch face, and in-app navigation and controls more expressive, while maintaining the instant familiarity of watchOS. Apple Intelligence enhances the fitness experience with Workout Buddy, which provides personalized, spoken motivation. The Workout app features a new layout, and offers music to listen to based on a user’s tastes and the workout type. watchOS 26 makes everyday interactions even more convenient with Smart Stack hints and updates to Messages, and introduces a new one-handed wrist flick gesture to easily dismiss notifications.

[…]

Workout Buddy is a first-of-its-kind fitness experience with Apple Intelligence that incorporates a user’s workout data and their fitness history to generate personalized, motivational insights during their session, based on data like heart rate, pace, distance, Activity rings, personal fitness milestones, and more.

[…]

Notifications are even easier to manage with a simple wrist flick gesture on Apple Watch Series 9, Apple Watch Series 10, and Apple Watch Ultra 2. When a user raises their wrist to check a notification but isn’t ready to respond, they can quickly turn their wrist over and back to dismiss the notification. The wrist flick gesture can be used to dismiss notifications and incoming calls, silence timers and alarms, and return to the watch face.

Previously:

Update (2025-06-11): See also: MacRumors.

Update (2025-06-16): Joe Rossignol:

Starting with watchOS 26, controls that are available in the Control Center gallery on an iPhone are automatically available on the Apple Watch as well. This is true even if the iOS app offering the control lacks a corresponding watchOS app. When you tap on one of these controls, the action is performed on the companion iPhone.

Apple Event Apple Intelligence Apple Software Announcement Notification Center watchOS watchOS 26 watchOS Release Workout WWDC

1 Comment

tvOS 26 Announced

Apple:

Featuring a stunning new design with Liquid Glass, tvOS 26 is designed to keep the focus on what’s playing so users never miss a moment. The Apple TV app also now showcases cinematic poster art that makes it fun and easy to discover what to play next. Enhancements to profile-switching and a streamlined way to log in to apps make it easier than ever to access entertainment, while updates to Apple Music Sing bring users new ways to enjoy singing along with friends using iPhone.

tvOS 26 adds a non-deletable home screen icon for Apple Music Sing; it’s just a shortcut to a section of the Music app. As I have no other choice, I guess I’ll bury it in a folder.

Previously:

Update (2025-06-11): Tim Hardwick:

Apple’s tvOS 26 announced at WWDC requires second-generation Apple TV 4K devices and later, which means the company is excluding older hardware from the update’s major visual overhaul.

Apple Event Apple Software Announcement Safari visionOS visionOS 26 visionOS Release WWDC

What tvOS needs is a comprehensive overhaul of the concept of the home screen. For years there have been two competing home screens: the original app-based home screen, and the newer ~~Apple TV+~~ content-based TV app. Real nerds, like me, know the TV app sucks and use the app-based home screen. The TV app has not been improved in terms of personalization or customization at all.

The sign-on feature once again requires adoption by streaming apps in order to work, and it’s tied to your Apple ID. Good luck with that getting widely adopted over QR codes and authorization URLs.

[…]

For some reason Apple decided to buck industry trends and all the show art tiles are movie posters now. I get it, it seems cinematic to evoke movie posters, but the interface is on a 16:9 screen. Use your noodles. This means that you get to see one row clearly. To make up for that, the show text is overlaid on top of the poster art with stylized fonts, like Photos Memories, making the shows harder to read. This change needs to be reverted.

visionOS 26 Announced

Apple (preview):

Everyday interactions become more immersive and personal, with widgets that integrate into a user’s space, spatial scenes that use generative AI to add stunning lifelike depth to photos, striking enhancements that make Personas feel more natural and familiar, and shared spatial experiences for Vision Pro users in the same room.

visionOS 26 also adds support for 180-degree, 360-degree, and wide field-of-view content from Insta360, GoPro, and Canon, while new enterprise APIs allow organizations to create spatial experiences unique to visionOS. And with support for PlayStation VR2 Sense controllers, players can enjoy a new class of games on Apple Vision Pro.

[…]

Users can select spatial browsing to transform articles on Safari, hide distractions, and reveal spatial scenes that come alive as they scroll. Web developers have the ability to embed 3D models directly into web pages, letting users shop and browse with depth and dimension, and see and manipulate 3D objects and models right in Safari.

Matthew Bischoff:

These are almost all updates to visionOS that folks have wanted from the beginning and I’m really glad that Apple hasn’t given up on the platform.

Previously:

Update (2025-06-11): Samuel Axon:

All told, the updates planned for visionOS 26 aren’t going to fundamentally transform Vision Pro or make it a breakthrough mainstream device—the price of the Vision Pro precludes that. Instead, most of them promise to refine the experience by adding features that are typical for other mixed-reality platforms and refocusing on the wins the platform has had, de-emphasizing the misses.

Update (2025-06-12): Jason Snell:

Spatial Personas are now the default, and there’s an entirely new Persona engine that makes them look remarkably better. The old Personas looked good straight on, but from a bit of an angle, they looked like a face tacked on to a flat piece of cardboard or something. These new Personas capture more of the side of the head, capture hair and eyelashes better, and do an incredible job of capturing skin details. Unfortunately, while beards look better, they still limit a Persona’s mouth movement.

Another drive forward is geographic persistence. In the long run, assuming AR glasses are a thing (which is what we’re all assuming here, because that’s why this whole project exists), you’ll want to be able to place an item somewhere and have it appear there when you come back to it later. In previous versions of visionOS, there was basically no item persistence at all—if you rebooted the Vision Pro, all your windows were closed, and you needed to set them up again.

visionOS 26 fixes all of that. Now you can leave items in one place and they’ll appear when you enter that space, even if the Vision Pro has rebooted or shut down in the interim. Windows are always where you left them. It’s great for short-term reusability, and a must if you take the long view.

Liquid Glass

Apple (Apple Design, Hacker News, MacRumors, Slashdot):

Apple today previewed a beautiful new software design that makes apps and system experiences more expressive and delightful while being instantly familiar. It’s crafted with a new material called Liquid Glass. This translucent material reflects and refracts its surroundings, while dynamically transforming to help bring greater focus to content, delivering a new level of vitality across controls, navigation, app icons, widgets, and more. For the very first time, the new design extends across platforms — iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS Tahoe 26, watchOS 26, and tvOS 26 — to establish even more harmony while maintaining the distinct qualities that make each unique.

Sebastiaan de With (Hacker News):

If you’re a designer, don’t miss the “Meet Living Glass” session on the WWDC Developer app. Incredible.

If we put aside the functionality, such as the return of the bottom toolbar in Safari, I think most of the iOS changes look pretty good. I like the icons. I like that buttons look more like buttons. The main problem is that there’s far too much transparency. I don’t know why we have to keep going through this cycle where Apple makes the text hard to read, then gradually fixes most of it, then makes it bad all over again.

Somehow, I don’t think any of this really works on macOS. The glass look just doesn’t seem to translate well. I think the sidebars and the heavily shadowed toolbars look ridiculous. I don’t like the corner radii or the icons in the menus. It’s by far the least attractive version of macOS, in my opinion, and I say that as someone who was not fond of the Big Sur redesign.

• • •

Adam Overholtzer:

It is interesting (and bad) that after the iOS 7 and Big Sur redesigns worked to thin or eliminate borders, these new designs for iOS and macOS have the thickest, heaviest borders those platforms have ever seen. They may say it’s insets and padding and depth and shadows, but big fat borders is what they are.

I don’t understand how removing borders and chrome (in the previous redesign) and adding them back both bring “greater focus to a user’s content.”

• • •

The visionOS design language was gorgeous. This… this is something entirely different

Tomas Kafka:

I am not excited about the rumored iOS redesign - current iOS seems fine, and it takes @apple 3+ years to stabilize a design change and fix the papercuts they accidentally introduced by attempting to do too much.
Busywork exercise for both Apple and 3rd party devs.
Writing this because I actually like iOS, and I think the current design is strong enough to support everything the next decade years can bring, and those developer-decades are needed elsewhere …

While I’m more writer than designer these days, I was trained in the visual arts. I was always taught that clarity and legibility should be at the forefront of anyone’s mind when designing. Surely, that’s even more the case when creating an operating system for many millions of users. Yet even in Apple’s press release, linked earlier, there are multiple screenshots where key interface components are, at best, very difficult to read. That is the new foundational point for Apple design. And those screenshots will have been designed to show the best of things.

Marques Brownlee:

I’m a bit concerned with readability

Mishaal Rahman:

I’m glad Google decided to heavily blur the background with Android’s Material 3 Expressive redesign.
Had they decided to make things more transparent, it would’ve looked worse! iOS 26 suffers from having too much transparency, IMO.

Marcel:

This might be good graphic design but I’m not convinced this is good software design. Apparently an unpopular opinion in Apple HQ: Text should be readable.

This looks awesome as long as you don’t need to read any of the text in the glass blobs with stuff behind them

Tom Warren:

can’t wait to not be able to read anything on my iPhone

First impressions of Apple‘s new design: they’re sacrificing usability for bling. And android’s new redesign looks a whole lot better.

Ryan Jones:

Feels exactly like iOS 7 – way too far at first.

This is awesome! For a few minutes.

I do not want this enabled constantly on my phone though!

Josh Puckett:

I love that we’re back to ‘ok but which of these toggles is on and which is off’?! in iOS

I genuinely love how much more depth iOS’ icons have now.
The Camera icon is night and day better.
So much more charm than the flat, simpler ones.

Time is a flat circle, something something.

“Thoughtfully designed groups of controls free up space for your content”

Guys we invented hamburger menus

Maybe it’s not so bad when seen on device, but from this screenshot iPadOS’ new look really pains my eye:
the radius of sidebar & window don’t match
the small traffic light icons just look really off next to the toolbar icon
that icon also looks off next to the free-floating toolbar icons

• • •

This is a whole new macOS.

Jonathan Deutsch:

Apple just made a nano-texture display on its hardware to reduce the issues with using glass. Then they added all the flaws of glass back via software…
…The call is coming from inside the house! 😱

Tina Debove Nigro:

Just installed macOS Tahoe and I have very mixed feelings. It feels very cluttered, so many effects and shadows and overlays and my brain does not like it

There’s some stuff in MacOS 26 Tahoe I already don’t like, like putting needless icons next to almost every single menu item. But overall my first impression of Liquid Glass on MacOS is good too.

Check out the cool animations folders have when you drag a file over them… they open up. Then if they’re filled, the folder shows papers in them, otherwise they don’t. They also have an animation for when the file does actually move into it.
This was in Mac OS X even in the Tiger days but nice they bring back some charm. I also like these folders more than the one we previously had with Big Sur to Sequoia. They look far less childish.

Nathan Manceaux-Panot :

The disconnect is strange: Apple keeps talking about putting the focus on content rather than chrome; but the new UI elements are literally the most prominent thing in the new design. Raised sidebar, raised toolbar buttons—aesthetically these are nice, but they’re so attention-grabbing?!

How to update your app for the new design: cornerRadius * 5

Peter Steinberger:

The shadow is way too harsh.

I’m so glad my cooooonnnntteeeeeeennnnt has more room!
(which is also a lie, because they made the UI chrome like, way bigger, and added insets inside of insets inside of insets).

Dave Nanian:

Because it’s just so readable!

I really hope Apple will improve the contrast of the new UI on macOS before release. Looking at Finder, f.ex., as it is right now, everything looks like it’s bleeding together - with barely identifiable boundaries between sidebar and content.
Turn on the Status Bar and Path Bar at the bottom and it looks really off, highlighting the challenges text-rich and information-dense UIs will run into when adopting the “extend content below the sidebar” concept of Liquid Glass.

I’m getting pinstripe flashbacks.

Uli Kusterer:

The glass look demos exactly like the first stab at Aqua did. Looking forward to everyone turning off glass in accessibility, and the default transparency getting more opaque each year like Aqua did.

Previously:

Update (2025-06-11): Linda Dong:

Here are the tools we’ve got for you to design with Liquid Glass and the new design system.

Xor:

I am a graphics programmer, and here’s my feedback on Apple’s Liquid Glass beta. The idea is cool, but it’s difficult to work with from a UX perspective.

Meek Geek:

Shiny things always look great at the store, and this looks like it was designed to look sexy at the Apple Store. It’s an obvious artifact of the Alan Dye UI design factory, with an obsession for how things look (in UI mockups) rather than how they work (in the real world).

Unfortunately, I strongly disagree with the design choices that Alan Dye, and his team, have made with Liquid Glass. Some of it is the material quality of the elements, but a large part of my disagreement is the construction and arrangement of the elements themselves.

juan:

i can’t believe apple shipped the UI microsoft only ever shows in their ads

Riccardo Mori:

Yes, folks, I too hope that Apple will dial down the orgy of glass effects and transparency in future betas, but Jesus Fucking Christ this is not a 2-year-old startup. This is one of the richest companies in the world, with resources and (supposedly) 40+ years of experience in UI/UX design. Has nobody at Apple — at any stage of design development — noticed all the issues we’ve been noticing since the Liquid Glass reveal yesterday? And if they have and greenlit them, isn’t that worrying?

It’s especially egregious because Sure, this is the first dev beta. But it’s also 30 days before a public beta. Considering their cadence for releasing a new OS every year (ugh), they really can’t just pop something like this out in a half-baked state, as there are fundamental issues with the premise that need to be fixed… and won’t be before it ships ‘for real’.

Francisco Tolmasky:

All the legibility stuff is not a bug. It’s literally the design language. Look at this logo. White on white. This is what they’re going for. They didn’t repeatedly choose the worst background combo to show stuff, they chose each and every one of those. I think they’re actually really into this.

Nick Lockwood:

It was the same with iOS 7, and IMO that set back the industry for years working on redesigns rather than new features, and almost every single app looked worse after the transition

Ever since iOS 7 I can’t watch Apple’s design videos without thinking they are built from a completely incorrect starting premise and goals.
“UI gets out of the way of your content”

”hides when not needed”

”only appears when the user needs them”
The details hardly matter when listening it feels like all of this has completely the wrong goals from the start.

I feel like Liquid Glass is another iPhone first design that is being shoe-horned onto iPad and Mac. Its core showy feature is the dynamic highlight, which only makes sense on a device you hold in your hand and moves around a lot.

Aleen Simms:

What has surprised me this year is the number of times I’ve seen people encouraging others to hold their complaints until Apple finalizes the <platform>OS 26 releases in the fall.
“Things will change, these are not the final designs! Just wait,” they’ve been saying.
I’m telling you, unequivocally, that these people are wrong.
Now is the time to tell the folks at Apple where their design needs improvement. Their operating systems are in the earliest of early betas, when feedback is both expected and appreciated. This is when large changes to the way things look will be possible. In fact, now is probably the only time this will be possible for many design decisions.
[…]
While I agree that people should use the official route to submit suggestions and bug reports, I have had far better luck in resolving issues when I’ve been vocal about them on social media.

It’s interesting that people are claiming “It’s just a beta” and at the same time celebrating left-aligned text in alerts, where the centered text was introduced FIVE YEARS AGO.
There’s a lot of faith in Apple changing course, but my god, how long does that take?
Anyway, most of the crap from Big Sur is still here. When do we get back enabled keyboard shortcuts in menus?

Update (2025-06-12): Juli Clover:

Apple has multiple Accessibility options that are designed to customize iOS for different visual needs, and one of these options is Reduce Transparency. Toggling on Reduce Transparency adds a darker background to translucent areas like the Control Center, app icons, and app folders, improving contrast.

My biggest issue with Liquid Glass isn’t the lensing or the contrast, it’s that the layering just doesn’t make any sense. The design elevates the visual z order of layers almost in reverse order to how they’re actually placed down in the app. Sliders, tabs and segmented controls lift up even further than that on touch, and turn to liquid (for some reason), then drop back down when you let go

Adam Overholtzer:

They keep saying their goal is to “elevate your content” but this design does the literal opposite. On macOS, the “chrome” casts deep shadows over your content. It’s weird.

Andrew Abernathy:

I just fundamentally feel that overlaying chrome on content rarely really succeeds in deferring to the content, but instead interrupts it, and is often harder to tune out. Translucency can only reduce the overall perception of conflict in the scene, and the legibility and contrast issues have not really been solved. (Transient controls are the main exception that I can think of, which I don’t need to be translucent.) I guess many people are more bothered by dedicated control/nav space than I am.

Why does it seem to be so hard for Apple to realize that translucency is making things harder to read? In these images promoting Liquid Glass, it’s obvious to me that the light text on the left is made harder to read by the blurry light-coloured dog leg visible underneath it, and that the dark text in the address bar on the right is made harder to read by the blurry dark-coloured flower arrangement visible underneath it.
Are we just all resigned to our eye-straining fate as users at this point?

Michael Flarup:

New camera icon is a huge improvement.

A lot of chat about contrast issues distracts from other changes that are worth discussing. E.G here they removed all the separators between items and decreased font size, and perceptively I feel less confident that I can tap on the right one.

The background for the “Search” field does not look like “glass”, liquid or otherwise. It just looks like blurry splotches that make the gray text harder to read.

The “Search” field doesn’t look like a field at all. It just looks like what Apple over the years has FORCED us to see as a field — except that it’s even worse now.

To top it all off, the “field” makes the text and icon below/“underneath” it blurry as well.

Riccardo Mori:

Those notifications look like transparent stickers applied over a window pane. The distance between background and foreground elements appears minimal exactly because these are glass effects with too much transparency and very little opacity and contrast. The separation is very faint.
In iOS 6, depth was achieved through ‘material’ textures and by visibly blurring or obscuring the elements that had to lose focus, in a sort of exaggerated camera depth-of-field effect. Look what happens when I select a folder in iOS 6 — you can clearly see what’s in focus and what is not. You can easily distinguish the hierarchy of layers. You can perceive depth. It’s almost tangible.
In Mac OS, Liquid Glass does an even worse job at conveying depth. For starters, Finder windows look amorphous, the differentiation between active (in focus) and inactive (not in focus) windows is barely noticeable, and some details are still rough around the edges (no pun intended)[…]
[…]
The visual hierarchy is muddled: why have a seemingly 3D toolbar, but the three semaphore controls on the left keep being flat and 2D? Here, it seems that the sidebar area of the window is flat, and the area on the right with the toolbar and the window’s contents is 3D and layered, while the area on the far right, with the additional info on the selected item, has thin layers that make it appear as a sort of intermediate state between 2D and 3D[…]

Dan Counsell:

Can we please have the macOS X Lion UI back? 😍

This post has a lot of likes.

I still do not understand why these sidebars are floating on macOS Tahoe.
It really doesn’t add anything other than arbitrary discontinuities and weird banding problems.

Podcasts and Music on macOS 26 are a pretty extreme indicator of where this design is going. Relevant to me, of course, because my own @broadcastsapp strived to match the system Podcasts app from day one, six years ago. But now? 😅 It’s impossible not to look at some of the Liquid Glass experiences in macOS and worry

Mr. Macintosh:

Want to disable liquid glass and bring back the old menubar in macOS Tahoe?

Tyler Hall:

Liquid Glass, in Apple’s 2026 operating systems, feels like an attempt to reassert control over third-party app branding — forcing others to become a subset of the larger iOS brand and look and feel.
It also strikes me as a defense against the continued growth of cross-platform frameworks by furthering the distance between what’s a “real” iOS app versus a cross-platform app — or even against apps that try to meet in the middle of both platforms design-wise. It will be more challenging to build an app that feels at home on iOS with limited development and design budgets.
Put another way: three days after the WWDC keynote, Liquid Glass feels just as much a strategic business move as it does a design solution ~~in search of a problem~~.

Update (2025-06-13): Donny Wals:

Apple allows developers to opt-out of the redesign using a specific property list key that you can add to your app’s Info. When you add UIDesignRequiresCompatibility to your Info.plist and set it to YES, your app will run using the old OS design instead of the new Liquid Glass design.

[…]

Apple intends to remove this option in the next major Xcode release.

Update (2025-06-16): OMC (via Hacker News):

Apple’s introduction of Liquid Glass at WWDC 2025 represents far more than a visual refresh. It’s a calculated strategic repositioning that reveals how the company thinks about the next decade of human-computer interaction. While the design community debates readability and the tech press focuses on the absence of major AI announcements, Apple is quietly executing a playbook that should feel familiar to anyone who remembers the iPhone’s introduction: prepare users for a paradigm shift by making the transition feel inevitable.
[…]
Apple is preparing users for a world where the screen itself becomes less relevant.

Francisco Tolmasky:

So much for Liquid Glass being some sort of native differentiator that’s going to be in prohibitively difficult to copy on the web. To be clear, I don’t think you should use this. It’s bad enough we’re gonna make native UIs look like smudged lipstick, I don’t look forward to the entirety of the web looking that way too.

Steven Aquino:

As for Apple’s role vis-a-vis Liquid Glass, I will reiterate what I wrote last week by again saying Sarah Herrlinger, the company’s senior director of global accessibility policy and initiatives, indicated Liquid Glass was created to be accessible as possible and is simpatico with features such as Reduce Transparency. To suggest Apple has cratered its reputation on accessibility in the first developer beta of iOS 26 is categorically untrue and lacking common sense. My understanding has long been accessibility is on par with readying the new iPhones to ship as far as internal importance. The company’s efforts in accessibility is neither extraneous nor a lark; it’s a highly serious endeavor. Apple isn’t perfect in accessibility, of course, but to presume they purposely ignored accessibility in making Liquid Glass is to show a gross misunderstanding of a huge part of how the company thinks and works.

Sure, you can argue that the sky isn’t falling, that this is just Beta 1. But, to me, common sense is to look at what Apple does, over what it says. Apple spent a good portion of the keynote showing off Liquid Glass, and this part of WWDC is aimed at the mass market, not developers. It demonstrated a new design that is obviously less legible. It shipped a beta where Reduce Transparency and Increase Contrast do not work all throughout the OS and where there is greater aesthetic penalty for enabling them.

And it’s important to consider the track record. Apple has a long history of making legibility improvements over the course of years vs. during the summer beta period.

Lastly, Herrlinger seems to be hanging her hat on Reduce Transparency and other accessibility options working with Liquid Glass. That should be a baseline assumption. But if more people need to rely on those options, I don’t see how it can be said that the main design was “created to be accessible as possible.” Supposing that Apple did prioritize looking cool over accessibility, there’s no world in which a senior director would tell you that. So I think what they say only matters if it includes specific information, which does not seem to be the case here. Otherwise, the proof will be in the pudding in September.

Accessibility Apple Event Design iOS iOS 26 iPadOS iPadOS 26 Mac macOS Tahoe 26 tvOS tvOS 26 visionOS visionOS 26 watchOS watchOS 26 WWDC

20 Comments

WWDC 2025 Keynote

Apple (YouTube, MacRumors live blog, Adam Engst, Lobsters, Mac Power Users Talk):

Watch the WWDC25 keynote introducing our broadest design update ever and a more helpful Apple Intelligence. You’ll also learn about exciting features coming with iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS 26, watchOS 26, visionOS 26, and tvOS 26.

• • •

Marques Brownlee:

I asked Siri if there’s an Apple event today… she has no idea 😅

Dave Wood:

Zero mention of #siri or #homeKit. So much for the new home controller that was rumoured.

Geoff Duncan:

I don’t think I’ve cringed at a WWDC presentation harder than “I’ll use visual intelligence to determine what instrument this is,” followed by using Apple Intelligence for “What rock songs use this instrument.”

During the WWDC 2025 keynote today, Apple’s software engineering chief Craig Federighi said that the company will share more details about the personalized Siri features in the coming year, signaling that they are still not ready.

• • •

If you discount the completely over the top book-ending (the F1 cameo featuring Craig’s hair and the weird app review medley at the end), there were a few actual surprises in the keynote.
[…]
Direct access to Apple’s AI models via both APIs and Shortcuts, which is a game-changer for app developers and something that should have been done in the first place (I have been doing almost exactly what they demoed for over a year now with custom Shortcut actions that invoke Azure services, so I am glad they are finally catching up). But having that (and all the privacy-preserving components of their confidential computing platform) available to app developers is a huge win, and I hope they will also make it easier to use custom models in the future.

• • •

Helge Heß:

The new version numbers tell regular customers when they are supposed to actually install the software.
Like when iOS 26 is released in September 25, everyone now knows that one should better wait for January. Until all the most glaring bugs got ironed out by early adopters.

Steven Woolier:

I can’t wait to see what the dev version API looks like. My guess is it will not report 26.

Blacktop:

Wait so there WILL be an iOS19? 🤔

• • •

I didn’t expect anything remotely resembling an apology for any part of developer relations or Apple Intelligence.
I expected a cheerful demo of the new design, and a bunch of really cool new features, most of which were unrelated to what’s going on in AI elsewhere.
And that’s exactly what we got!

James Thomson:

To me, the main thing Apple needed to fix this WWDC was their relationship with developers, and this keynote suggests they think otherwise.

• • •

I actually liked that unhinged piano video

When I got to 6 out of 5 ⭐️, I almost just closed the window, but it kind of grew on me.

Previously:

Update (2025-06-11): Joe Rossignol:

In this WWDC 2025 edition of our Rumor Report Card, we have reflected on some of the bigger hits and misses leading into Apple’s annual developer conference.

Gui Rambo:

Apps built before the iOS 26 SDK get “19.0” as the system version from ProcessInfo. Once built with the iOS 26 SDK, the version then becomes “26.0”.
This is powered by a “SystemVersionCompat.plist” file in /System/Library/CoreServices

Stephen Hackett:

WWDC25: The Bento Boxes

I wasn’t satisfied with Apple, and Tim Cook, going into WWDC this year, and I remain dissatisfied after the fact. I don’t have the warm fuzzies when I see Craig on screen. There’s a distinct lack of new ideas in how the event is put together, and in many things in the event itself, despite all prior criticism about these very tame presentations lacking an air of sincerity and feeling incredibly “produced”.

Apple Event Apple Intelligence Apple Software Announcement Design iOS iPadOS Mac Shortcuts Siri tvOS visionOS watchOS WWDC

Apple’s event lasted for an hour and a half, but we’ve recapped all of the announcements in a 10 minute video, just in case you don’t want to sit through the entire spiel. We’ve also rounded up all of our coverage below, so you can dive deeper into any of the new features.

10 Comments

Saturday, June 7, 2025

Bill Atkinson, RIP

Facebook (Hacker News):

We regret to write that our beloved husband, father, and stepfather Bill Atkinson passed away on the night of Thursday, June 5th, 2025, due to pancreatic cancer. He was at home in Portola Valley in his bed, surrounded by family. We will miss him greatly, and he will be missed by many of you, too. He was a remarkable person, and the world will be forever different because he lived in it.

John Gruber (Mastodon):

One of the great heroes in not just Apple history, but computer history. If you want to cheer yourself up, go to Andy Hertzfeld’s Folklore.org site and (re-)read all the entries about Atkinson. Here’s just one, with Steve Jobs inspiring Atkinson to invent the roundrect. Some of his code and algorithms are among the most efficient and elegant ever devised. The original Macintosh team was chock full of geniuses, but Atkinson might have been the most essential to making the impossible possible under the extraordinary technical limitations of that hardware.

See also: Silicon Valley Pioneers and The Famous Computer Cafe Part 1 and Part 2 (via Matt Sephton).

Previously:

Update (2025-06-09): Tim Cook:

We are deeply saddened by the passing of Bill Atkinson. He was a true visionary whose creativity, heart, and groundbreaking work on the Mac will forever inspire us. Our thoughts are with his loved ones.

It’s WWDC time, so I didn’t expect Apple to take over their homepage with an Atkinson tribute. But a mention there would have been nice. Maybe put him above the Ted Lasso ad for a few days? It will be interesting to see whether they edited something into the keynote for today.

Chris Espinosa:

Bill Atkinson was one of the most brilliant, imaginative, and compelling people I ever had the privilege to work with. His vision touched every device you use today. And his heart, his open love and humanity, exceeded all of that.

Dan Bricklin:

Here’s Bill Atkinson (and rest of team) answering questions right after the Macintosh was debuted at the Boston Computer Society in 1984 starting at 28:25 - he demos MacPaint and more. May his memory be a blessing!

Michael B. Johnson:

I’ll never forget the hours he spent with me at Foo Camp years ago, explaining all manner of things re: graphics.
What an interesting, interested person he was.
We in the tech world owe him a lot.

Amy:

Vale Bill Atkinson. HyperCard is always a part of the history of Apple. Playing around with it in High School was part of what got me into software development.

I don’t have a lot of heroes, but Bill Atkinson was one of them.
I had the good fortune of meeting him while we were both working on our first iPad apps. He was as gracious, smart, curious, and funny as you’d think.

Tom Harrington:

I remember seeing Bill Atkinson at WWDC. It was like a god had just walked into the room.

Eric Schwarz:

I spent a lot of time in the late ’90s messing with old Macs, which meant that Bill Atkinson’s name and work came across my screen long before I had access to the Internet. Considering that the original Macintosh had severe technological constraints to keep it affordable, Atkinson made the most of the resources available, particular in the graphical side of things. He gave us the “marching ants” selection box, FatBits, MacPaint, the menu bar (!), QuickDraw, and HyperCard. One of the most beautiful contributions, however, has to be his dithering algorithm, a way to take high-resolution color images and draw them with only black and white pixels—if you want to see how this works for yourself, BitCam by The Iconfactory is an excellent homage on iOS.

Steve Canon:

kvImageConvert_DitherAtkinson remains one of my favorite APIs that I’ve added in the last two decades. A+ dithering, would apply to grayscale image.

It’s a simple algorithm, but making it performant on modern graphics hardware is hard.

Quinn:

I mourn the death of Bill Atkinson. But I also celebrate his life! We all benefited from his work, and none more than me.

And while the standard adage is “Never meet your heroes”, in this case that’s nonsense. The few times I met him were an absolute delight.

Brian Lewis:

he was a delight the times I met up with him during WWDC.

Met him there in 2010 and made a point to tell him I’d not be a programmer now if not for him.

Fazal Majid:

I only met him once, in a non-computing context, when he came to do a book signing at Stacey’s Books in San Francisco (RIP) for his book “Within the Stone”, and spoke about how he worked with his Japanese printers to push the state of the art in color reproduction possible using their printing process, using bespoke software he of course wrote himself.
Bill was always a keen photographer, even in the days of the Macintosh, e.g. Thunderscan.

Benj Edwards:

After leaving Apple in 1990, Atkinson co-founded General Magic with Marc Porat and Andy Hertzfeld, attempting to create personal communicators before smartphones existed. Wikipedia notes that in 2007, he joined Numenta, an AI startup, declaring their work on machine intelligence “more fundamentally important to society than the personal computer and the rise of the Internet.”
In his later years, Atkinson pursued nature photography with the same artistry he’d brought to programming. His 2004 book “Within the Stone” featured close-up images of polished rocks that revealed hidden worlds of color and pattern.

Uli Kusterer:

How much of a HyperCard nerd am I? Yes.

Peter Cohen:

Had the honor to talk with him several times over the years. He’d often hold court in the press rooms at Apple events and regale us with stories about early life at Apple and making the software that made the Mac work.

Jason Snell:

RIP to an all-time great.

Mike Piatek-Jimenez:

So much of my early interaction with computers was shaped by Bill Atkinson. I can’t count the number of hours I spent on our Mac 512Ke in MacPaint (the first app I ever used) and later in HyperCard. The way those tools captivated me has strongly influenced my eventual career path as an app developer.

When I was a 10 year old kid or so, living in a country that seemed so distant in every way from California where all the cool things were being made, HyperCard was the trigger that made me understand I could write my own graphical, complex, Mac-feeling apps. I never stopped since then. No other set of ones and zeros was so important for my career and life.

Joe Heck:

I never met him, so don’t know who he was directly, but his insights and efforts had a huge effect - indirectly anyway - on me. I appreciate his mind and what he shared into the world. Hypercard, in particular - and I still see people enthused and trying to replicate aspects of it. A true bicycle for the mind.

James Thomson:

Amongst all the other great things than Bill Atkinson made, I wouldn’t have met my wife if it wasn’t for Hypercard!

i wish i could convey how jaw dropping this macpaint demo was.
all of this was totally new. outside of small xerox demos to a handful of people, no one had seen anything like it.
all of these little pixel editing tools that seem ho hum today — all of that was brand new.
look at how utterly smooth the mouse worked.
plus the mouse, menus, fonts, icons, windows, buttons, scrolling… all new.

so much of the trajectory of my life was altered by this one person’s amazing creations.

Geoff Duncan:

So, Bill Atkinson is probably the reason I stuck with computers, and definitely the reason I wound up on Macs. I’d done bits of programming before I stumbled across HyperCard (BASIC, 6502 Assembler, Pascal, shell scripting, blah blah blah—even smidgens of FORTRAN and COBOL) but it was always with disinterest: I just wanted to do a thing, and if I had to program to do it…sigh, fine. I couldn’t wait to put the task behind me.
But HyperCard…HyperCard made programming accessible and fun. And while HyperCard (and HyperTalk) had distinct limitations and shortcomings, it was amazing what it could be pushed to do—and I enjoyed doing it, which is something I cannot say of *any* development environment I’ve worked with since.
I worked on games and educational titles built in HyperCard, and I created heaps of specialty and in-house systems (some of which were running until very recently). For years I ran a specialized web crawler that was (yep) built in HyperCard. Large parts of the backend for TidBITS were glued together with HyperCard. And no, none of this was rock solid, but it was very rare that HyperCard was the piece that failed.
Of course, Bill Atkinson’s contributions to the Mac, to computing, and the world were much larger than HyperCard. He was a giant, and I’m privileged to have stood on a tiny portion of one of his shoulders. Thank you.

Dave Nanian:

The time the Lisa team visited the CS Department at Brown back in the day was incredibly inspiring to those of us working on early GUIs. Bill was super smart and gracious. RIP.

He literally was the reason I got into HCI.

mtconleyuk:

I never met the man, but I bought my first Mac in 1985, worked at Apple for almost 10 years, and I can honestly say that there are only about half a dozen things that have had as great an influence on my life as the products and the ethos he helped bring to life.

Adam Engst:

The impact of Bill’s contributions is immeasurable. Although he worked alongside other early members of the Lisa and Macintosh teams, everything I find suggests that he wrote the Mac’s QuickDraw graphics engine and the initial versions of MacPaint and HyperCard almost single-handedly. It’s almost incomprehensible that one person could have created so much of such import in a relatively short span of time.

[…]

While I was never enough of a graphics person to get much from MacPaint, it introduced the bitmap editing paradigm to the mass market and heavily influenced Adobe Photoshop. HyperCard, on the other hand, changed my life. It was the reason TidBITS came into being (see “TidBITS History,” 18 April 1994), and some of the impetus for Tim Berners-Lee’s creation of the World Wide Web stemmed from a desire to provide distributed, cross-machine linking and multi-user access in a hypertext system—capabilities that HyperCard lacked.

Steven Levy:

Everyone kept telling me, “Wait till you meet Bill and Andy,” referring to Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld, two key writers of the Mac’s software. Here’s what I wrote about the encounter in my book, Insanely Great:
I met Bill Atkinson first. A tall fellow with unruly hair, a Pancho Villa moustache, and blazing blue eyes, he had the unnerving intensity of Bruce Dern in one of his turns as an unhinged Vietnam vet. Like everyone else in the room, he wore jeans and a T-shirt. “Do you want to see a bug?” he asked me. He pulled me into his cubicle and pointed to his Macintosh. Filling the screen was an incredibly detailed drawing of an insect. It was beautiful, something you might see on an expensive workstation in a research lab, but not on a personal computer. Atkinson laughed at his joke, then got very serious, talking in an intense near-whisper that gave his words a reverential weight. “The barrier between words and pictures is broken,” he said. “Until now the world of art has been a sacred club. Like fine china. Now it’s for daily use.”

MacDailyNews:

To fans of Apple and the Macintosh, he was a hero who made technology delightful, proving that one coder’s vision could change the world.

With the news of the passing of Bill Atkinson a few days ago, I've been drawn down some truly and insanely great rabbit holes of information and fun clips about the man who invented so much of the computing we now take for granted today.

Manton Reece:

I was actually thinking of old QuickDraw a week ago while I was mowing the yard. No joke, my mind wandered into realizing that the most efficient mowing path is a roundrect.

Bill Atkinson History HyperCard Mac MacPaint QuickDraw Rest in Peace

I spent so much time using 680x0-based Macs and reading about the design choices for the ROM and built-in drawing routines that Atkinson’s stuff made a profound impression on me even before folklore.org was a thing, and of course I know most of the anecdotes involving him by heart (especially the lines of code one).

Russell Hampton:

Bill Atkinson's HyperCard was an amazing piece of software that taught me so much about programming without having to get a degree in it!

Chris Hanson:

In honor of Bill Atkinson, I’ve been reading the QuickDraw source code released by CHM and writing a little C implementation of his Region structure, which was an incredibly elegant solution to a problem so many people working on window systems never even realized they had.

Peter Cohen:

Bill Atkinson’s passing the week before WWDC is an unfortunate coincidence, but maybe it’ll help reframe Apple’s enduring legacy on modern computing at a time when the company’s leadership has, without question, lost the fucking plot.

Thomas Brand:

everyone knows you couldn’t use QuickDraw in 1985 without paying the Core Technology Fee.

Bill Atkinson (Hacker News):

Toward the end of the day, Steve took me aside and told me that any hot new technology I read about was actually two years old. “There is a lag time between when something is invented, and when it is available to the public. If you want to make a difference in the world, you have to be ahead of that lag time. Come to Apple where you can invent the future and change millions of people’s lives.”

Update (2025-06-16): Antonio:

Bill Atkinson was a legend. The @computerhistory.bsky.social has many interviews with him up on YouTube. This one is my favourite.

3 Comments

WWDC 2025 Preview

The 2025 Worldwide Developers Conference is just a few days away, with the keynote event set to take place on Monday, June 9. Ahead of Apple’s big software debut, we’ve rounded up all of the rumors that we’ve heard so far about iOS 26, macOS 26, and Apple’s other updates.

Apple:

Today, Apple announced the winners and finalists of this year’s Apple Design Awards, celebrating 12 standout apps and games that set a high bar in design.

Congrats to all of this year’s Apple Design Award winners! Sad that there’s no ceremony this year, though :(

Curt Clifton:

New for WWDC25 — online group labs! Register now to join Apple engineers online to ask questions, get advice, and follow the discussion about the week’s biggest announcements in real time, Tuesday, June 10 through Friday, June 13!

Paul Hudson:

So, a number of us decided to start this repository to host links to various WWDC events, news, and tutorials from around the community. That means this repo will contain links to events being organized around our community, plus content from SwiftUI Lab, Hacking with Swift, Donny Wals, Swift with Majid, and many more – and we would love to share your articles too.

Basic Apple Guy:

WWDC25 is nearly upon us, and it felt only fitting to release a new wallpaper to decorate your desktop for the occasion.

Jordan Morgan:

Today, I’m proud to give you the eleventh annual Swiftjective-C W.W.D.C. Pregame Quiz featuring Apple Intelligence, Jony Ive and more!

Upgrade:

It’s time for our 10th annual competition regarding what will happen at Apple’s WWDC keynote! What will be announced? Will there be a major redesign? What will the AI story be? We predict it all!

Jason Snell:

My big question for this year’s WWDC is: Will Apple apologize, or even acknowledge, the fact that it announced numerous AI features at this same event last year that are still not shipping? Even after having attended a couple of dozen WWDCs, I really don’t know which way Apple will go.

A WWDC that is rumored to promise major iPad UX updates, sweeping OS redesigns, and built-in LLMs I can build new features atop? Honestly, that could be a dream WWDC. It could spur me on to ship major new versions of all my apps with tons of new things.

It could go very wrong, too — we had to live with the consequences of the iOS 7 redesign for a long time before apps started to approach looking nice again.

Warner Crocker:

The reason I titled this post “Thoughts and Prayers Heading into WWDC 2025” isn’t that I’m offering up good vibes for Apple as they try to work out of the messes they’ve mostly created for themselves. I’m actually hoping — most likely against hope — that Apple will finally clean up some of the annoyances they’ve neglected over several generations of iOS and macOS.

Brian Stucki:

In so many years past, developers have entered WWDC disgruntled and generally left pretty enthusiastic and hopeful. I’m having a hard time picturing this happening in a couple weeks without some massive changes. (And even then, we’ll only be cautiously trusting.) I guess we’ll see.

Apple can give a fresh coat of paint to all their operating systems but unless you fix the buggy state of everything Apple… well, if you put lipstick on a pig, it’s still a pig.

I don’t know if the news media or even Apple engineers understand the existential dread that developers can feel about WWDC. The latter are excited to show what they’ve done, the former to report it, and we’re excited too, but also terrified.

For developers, WWDC is like an annual employee performance review, from which we could get a big raise (new features and platforms), or we could get fired (Sherlocked, deprecated), although none of that actually depends on on our past performance.

Max Oakland:

I’m not excited at all. It’s become more a “what are they going to screw up this time” vibe

The first 12 or so years that I was writing Mac OS X apps, it was always exciting to anticipate what new features or frameworks would be announced and how I could leverage them to improve my apps. The last 12 or so years, Apple has given speeches about how much they love developers and then gone on to make changes that felt like they were meant to kill my apps, make them harder to use and harder for customers to discover, and drown us all in rising sea of bugs.

Previously:

Update (2025-06-09): Andy Park:

mindblowingly on point.

Roberto Mateu:

But his closing thoughts really sting as an Apple fan. As my grandma used to say: quien se pica, es porque ají come, which closest translation might be: If the shoe fits, wear it..

Jaanus Kase:

I have the same sentiment as your last paragraph
I have come to accept that WWDC is an annual ritual of getting new drop of Apple half-hearted efforts and bugs on top of previous half-hearted, unfinished and unfixed efforts and bugs
The pile just keeps growing every year and there is never any closure to anything any more
The older technologies had a beginning and end, they were somewhat focused and stable
But anything from the past ten years feels like an unstable shaky mess

Benedict Cohen:

new things used to seem unfinished but conceptually solid. Now they feel like proof of concepts that haven’t been thought through. The only exception I can think of is Combine but that was quickly abandoned in favour of Observation and Async algorithms, both of which are a mess.

We’re at the point where a big change is putting a new coat of paint on our creations. Sure, it looks nice, and customers will love it. But it’s a lot of work and none of it sparks our imaginations.
But what is exciting these days?
Large Language Models: a huge body of statistical data that can be leveraged to solve problems that have heretofore been intractable. It’s the most exciting technology in decades because it lets our imaginations run wild and create new things.
And that’s a problem for developers in Apple’s ecosystem. Because while the company has done a significant amount of research with these models, and includes one on every iPhone, iPad, and Mac, the core capabilities of the mechanism are out of reach.
[…]
Instead of building our own ideas on top of an LLM, we’re supposed to provide the internal details of our apps to Apple so they can do it on our behalf.

Allison Johnson (Hacker News):

Apple is on defense at WWDC. Tim Cook’s in the pressure cooker.

Apple Intelligence Artificial Intelligence iOS iOS 26 Mac macOS Tahoe 26 Programming visionOS watchOS WWDC

I am enmeshed in the Apple ecosystem so, in some ways, it should be exciting the company has to try a little harder. I am not. I do not think anyone expects Apple will sell dramatically fewer iPhones this year, nor will it lose subscribers to services, its increasingly important recurring revenue printer. Apple was a more interesting company when it could not be certain its customers would buy more stuff. I hope, after the Vision Pro’s release, it is also understanding it cannot take its developer base for granted, either.

[…]

I am, as ever, looking forward to seeing what is being announced tomorrow, albeit with the understanding I will be watching a slick infomercial possibly containing concept videos. It is hard to see how one could be a fan of a multi-trillion-dollar company. I am just a customer, like a billion-plus others.

Adam Tow:

We had a good mix of people from all across the Apple community attend my Pre-WWDC25 Gathering in downtown San Jose.
[…]
With the Pre-WWDC25 Gathering behind me, I’m looking forward to the rest of the week at WWDC25. I’ve read most of the rumors and I’m especially curious about the new design direction—and how it might affect the apps I currently have on the App Store. Automation is near and dear to my heart, so I’ll be keeping a close eye on any updates to Shortcuts and App Intents.

Basic Apple Guy (Reddit):

We all have our wishlist of what we hope to see at WWDC, and today, I am presenting my 5th Annual WWDC Bingo Board of my hopes, prognostications, and stagecraft predictions at this year’s event!

Previously:

How Apple Could Help With AI and LLMs

12 Comments

Clip Rejected via Notarization

Riley Testut:

The latest Clip update has been stuck in Notarization for 3 days now. I swear if Apple announces a clipboard manager at WWDC…
[…]
Update: it was rejected because the keyboard extension doesn’t do anything if Full Access isn’t enabled 🙄
Even though the previous submissions also didn’t do anything without Full Access enabled…

Recall that iOS’s notarization for apps outside the App Store has a human review component, but that Apple said it would be about “security and privacy and to maintain device integrity.” Apple has been harassing Testut’s apps ever since the debut of App Marketplaces, last year rejecting Clip with a false statement about how it uses push notifications.

Pierre Tzt:

How is it the job of notarization to give this kind of feedback? The abuse of power is insane here.

Simon B. Støvring:

I thought this was the kind of rejection third-party app stores would avoid 😞

Previously:

Update (2025-06-09): Steve Troughton-Smith:

Apple is using ‘Notarization’ as just another form of App Review. And probably violating the DMA, again, in the process.

Pieter Omvlee:

I don’t know what Notarization means anymore today but if it means this, that’s really bad.

WWDC 2025 Wish Lists

Dave DeLong:

All I want for #WWDC is for Xcode to correctly report build status.
Literally nothing else. Fix this and I’ll stop complaining about stuff for an entire year. PLEASE.
Other fixes would be nice too, but the #1 thing an IDE needs to do is show correct information. If it can’t do that, it doesn’t matter what else it can do; it’s not trustworthy.

Danny Bolella:

In all sincerity, I would of course love for many of the AI goodies we see with IDE’s like VS Code and Cursor make it’s way (natively) into Xcode.

[…]

If better AI in Xcode didn’t happen this year, I’d be fine with that.

Instead, I rather see Xcode become more stable and more robust, in general. Xcode really does provide some awesome features when you stop and take stock. But there are enough annoyances with Xcode that produce some of the negative/meh feelings I read and see in the community.

Majid Jabrayilov (Reddit):

WWDC 25 is a good chance for Apple to release Swift Assist and provide the modern environment for app development.
Another exciting release they could consider is the MCP server for Xcode, which would be a significant surprise.
[…]
I think it is time to introduce the Project.swift file, allowing us to configure Xcode projects.
[…]
Whenever you have a huge collection of items, there is no way to display them using SwiftUI built-in views while providing a smooth user experience. The only way is to wrap UIKit’s collection or table views.

Fatbobman (Reddit):

If Apple were to fully embrace and support SPM, it could become the ideal method for project organization, code sharing, and collaborative development within the Apple ecosystem.
[…]
Apple should not restrict plugin development for a professional tool like Xcode based on consumer-level security considerations. Maintaining an open and vibrant plugin ecosystem is essential for Xcode’s sustained growth and innovation.
[…]
I strongly suggest that Apple takes a bold step in splitting lesser-used functionalities into independent applications. This would streamline Xcode, allowing developers to focus exclusively on its core editing and debugging capabilities.
[…]
Apple could establish a remote device lab, allowing developers to quickly test compatibility across various devices and OS versions directly from the cloud, significantly speeding up the troubleshooting and issue-resolution workflow.

Helge Heß:

binary fragments, specifically for macros

SwiftUI fixes, not enhancements, like say a working List

OK, maybe a custom diffing protocol for SwiftUI

SwiftUI testing

a cheaper AvP would be cool

proper Xcode support for Linux would be sweet

Simon B. Støvring:

Imagine if Apple fixes that thing where, if you rename a file in a Swift package, Xcode will actually compile your code. Wouldn’t that be quite a WWDC, huh?

Dave DeLong:

It’s another one of those days where #Xcode is making me want to throw my computer through the window and go become a hermit.
Today it’s the fact that if you open a project from an unwritable location, Xcode will pop up this alert EVERY THREE SECONDS UNTIL YOU CLOSE THE PROJECT.

Christian Beer:

don’t close my project structure anymore

don’t activate schemes that I deactivated

support space key to de-/activate schemes in scheme mgmt

don’t reload all packages when opening an existing project

Overcast:

The best solution would be for Apple to add multi-item drag-and-drop to SwiftUI List, just as UITableView and UICollectionView have had for a VERY long time. It continues to be on my wishlist for every new iOS version.

RobbiewOnline:

Fix Siri

Open up Mac Mail API for composing

Let iPhone mirroring work when use sidecar with iPad

make Xcode nice or open up more

enable developers to refund customers from a dashboard like Google play

downloads from the AppStore should be blazingly fast

kill off provisioning profiles or make simple!

Helge Heß:

If Xcode 17 (release) comes with fast macro builds by default (i.e. not requiring an experiemental feature flag), I think I would be happy w/ this years #WWDC.

One random example: why do we get email notifications for EDITED user reviews but NOT for NEW user reviews? It’s baffling.

Krishna Sadasivam:

Still untouched, however, are System Settings and Stage Manager. System Settings still feels cumbersome when it comes to locating specific settings, while Stage Manager remains a kludgy curiosity. Both could benefit from a complete re-think.
[…]
I would like Time Machine to have more granular control over what folder(s) get backed up, include additional custom backup schedules, and have the ability to define how long I want to keep my backups for. A Time Machine-to-iCloud backup would be fantastic, as well, allowing users to access their files from all their Apple devices.

Colin Devroe:

Add a Switcheroo-like profile picker to Safari to allow opening a specific profile when a link is clicked from outside of the browser.

Completely ditch Siri – Keep the name, but tell us that you’ve taken all of the Siri code and rm -rf’d it. The number of things Siri does reliably right (adding a reminder, starting and stopping a timer) can be rewritten very quickly. Ditch everything else.

[…]

Photos for Mac move referenced library to a different volume.

[…]

A native way to run Electron/Chromium apps – I think Electron, or whatever it is called today, is here to stay. And so many of the most popular apps use it, macOS should embrace that and make macOS the best platform to run these apps rather than trying to force native apps.

David Smith:

This is an opportunity for Apple to reset their developer relationships and make announcements that clearly show a desire for our mutual benefit. I hope to shelve this distraction and get back to work, building wonderful products for this wonderful platform. We’ll see if Apple agrees.

Here are my suggestions for low-hanging fruit for WWDC announcements that would be easy developer relations wins for Apple:
At least double, if not more, the free 5 GB iCloud limit.
No TestFlight review delay. Builds approved immediately, with the option for them to review on their time.
Tweaks to Small Business Program - either decrease the split, or increase the revenue cap, or both.

If Apple ever touches the Small Business Program again (15% fee instead of 30% for devs making under $1M/year in the App Store), they should fix its biggest issues: it’s not automatic, and it’s not progressive.

If you’re about to cross $1M in December, you’re highly incentivized to remove your app from sale until January 1. That’s dysfunctional.

Just apply the 15% rate automatically to the first $1M/year that any developer makes. No applications, no cliffs, no delays.

Michael Rowe:

I think I applied for it about 6 months ago, and have still not gotten any notification that I was approved. My tiny apps have barely covered the developer program fees, the SMP would help it do it. Agree it should be AUTOMATIC.

Over on our forums, there are a couple wishlists of features that users have been contributing to since last June.
We’ve rounded up a few of the features that have been suggested.

BasicAppleGuy:

Whats on your #WWDC25 Wishlist?

Previously:

Update (2025-06-09): Helge Heß:

A problem I have is that I get too excited about my own fantastic #WWDC wishes. Thoughts like, “probably not, but what if they actually did release WebObjects 6 this year”, or “unlikely, but imagine they release SwiftScript”! Or “Last year they showed SwiftData w/ arbitrary backends, this year they show it server side running against PG.”
I make up self inflicted, unrealistic, sparks of hope. And will be disappointed.

My kingdom for a ForEach view that can take a constructor for a separator view between all the regular views.

OK, been spending the week working with Claude Code on my Mac app and it’s pretty game changing. It really accelerates the rate you can get things done, but still lets you verify everything step by step so you can keep the code looking the way you want. It’s very good at looking through my code base and figuring out where functionality is located to work on it, and matching my coding style. My official WWDC wish is for Apple to acquire Anthropic and build this right into Xcode.

with wwdc around the corner, apple’s dev relations in a tailspin, and AI coding sucking the air out of the room, i’m really hoping it will catalyze some real change in apple dev.

my wishlist is to focus on real app results — UX improvements over superficial UI.

and less on precise language gymnastics.

Norbert Doerner:

My wishlist for #apple #wwcd?
Bugfixes
Bugfixes
More bugfixes
Apple has failed to provide a stable OS platform in recent years, and Apple has failed to provide fixes for even the most glaring bugs.
Especially macOS, which is my main working environment every day, has fallen into massive disrepair, with new embarrassing bugs showing up in every single new release.
Apple should be ashamed for this bad software quality and start fixing the bugs today!
I am very much NOT interested in ANY new features as long as the core of macOS is so slow and unstable.

What’s nine years between friends?

“All I want from WWDC25 is for iOS 26 and iCloud to finally sync my photos properly”

Apple’s annual dev shindig is nearly here. The world expects AI-powered unicorns. I’d settle for my iPhone doing its job and syncing my photos.

Apple Software Quality Artificial Intelligence Electron iOS iOS 26 iPadOS Mac macOS Tahoe 26 Macros Model Context Protocol (MCP) Programming Siri Stage Manager Swift Assist Swift Programming Language SwiftUI System Preferences tvOS watchOS WWDC Xcode

I’m honestly hoping for a super boring nothingburger WWDC this year, because I’ve got something else big that I want to accomplish this summer.

Dominik Hauser:

Deprecation of SwiftUI

Objective-C 3.0

Refactoring support in Xcode

23 Comments

Sequoia’s New rsync

Michael Stapelberg (in January):

With macOS 15 Sequoia (released in September 2024), Apple has started shipping openrsync (created by Kristaps Dzonsons, from OpenBSD) as an alternative to the original rsync (“tridge”, from the Samba project).

When you run “rsync”, a wrapper will inspect your command and dispatch to either /usr/libexec/rsync/rsync.samba or rsync.openrsync.

If you need one version over the other, select them explicitly — and probably rsync.samba will disappear eventually…

How did I notice this? A formerly working transfer of mine broke (starting an rsync daemon via SSH).

Bill Toulas (Reddit):

Over 660,000 exposed Rsync servers are potentially vulnerable to six new vulnerabilities, including a critical-severity heap-buffer overflow flaw that allows remote code execution on servers.

It doesn’t seem to be documented, but Apple’s fix for this was to remove rsync.samba from macOS 15.4. The wrapper that Stapelberg linked to is now gone, though it lives on in the Git history.

Rich Trouton (Hacker News):

Without going in-depth into the background legal issues, the reason for not providing rsync 3.x is that Apple decided that while it could comply with the terms of GPLv2 license with regards to rsync 2.x, it could not comply with the terms of GPLv3 license with regards to rsync 3.x.

What this has meant for macOS is that it has been shipping with a version of rsync which was last updated in 2006. While Apple has been updating the rsync 2.6.9 command line tool it shipped with macOS as needed in response to security issues and other problems, the fact remains that Apple’s version of rsync up until macOS Sequoia was almost twenty years old and did not include any of the new features introduced in rsync versions which came after version 2.6.9.

Now with macOS Sequoia, Apple has replaced rsync 2.6.9 with openrsync, an implementation of rsync which is not using any version of the GPL open source license. Instead, openrsync is licensed under the BSD family of licenses, specifically the ISC license.

adrian_b:

Looking at the sparse documentation of openrsync does not create any confidence for me that it can be an acceptable substitute for rsync.

It seems to work fine for my purposes, but certainly a lot of the features are not supported.

Exploit GNU Mac macOS 15 Sequoia Open-source Software rsync Security

Really annoying that Apple is more committed to being stubborn shout GPL than actually shipping good software that doesn’t randomly break people’s workflows

SBGrid:

Openrsync aims for compatibility with modern rsync, but accepts only a subset of rsync’s command-line arguments. We have seen problems using this openrsync build with the SBGrid Installation Manager.

Fravadona:

I updated a MacPro from Ventura to Sequoia and now the rsync command have problems when wrapped in a script.

Jeff Freymueller:

I have several directories with thousands of files that I synchronize to my Mac using rsync. With Sequoia Apple has switched to a new rsync -- I can tell because the verbose output has changed. But this rsync has a bug that shows up on both Intel and Apple Silicon. This has been persistent across all versions of MacOS 15 to date, and on two different Macs.

Rachel Kroll (Hacker News):

rsync has both -I and -c which promise to not use the quick method and instead will run a checksum on the files. It’s slower so you won’t want to do this normally, but it’s not a bad idea to add this to the mix of things that you do every so many rotations.

Previously:

10 Comments

Thursday, June 5, 2025

ToothFairy 2.8.6

ToothFairy 2.8.6 is a maintenance update of my Bluetooth menu bar utility.

Some interesting issues were:

There’s a new issue with macOS Sequoia where sometimes IOBluetoothDevice never sends a notification that a device has connected, even though the device has actually connected and isConnected() now returns true.
Separately, sometimes the device connects (with no notification) but isConnected() remains false.
There was a longstanding bug where we were modifying a view layout from a background thread. macOS is now detecting this and _AssertAutoLayoutOnAllowedThreadsOnly() raises an NSInternalInconsistencyException.
I’m having trouble testing my Mac App Store build because after exit(173) it will prompt me to log in with my sandbox account, but the verification code never arrives. I’m not sure what Mac it’s even supposedly going to—where can you access the device list for a sandbox account? This had been a problem for a long time, but there used to be an option to have it send the code via SMS to the phone number on my developer account. That seems to be gone.

Previously:

Apple ID Bluetooth Bug Cocoa iTunes Connect Sandbox Testers Mac Mac App Mac App Store macOS 15 Sequoia Programming ToothFairy

Pair Networks Price Increase

I’ve been hosting ATPM with Pair Networks for almost 25 years now. At one point, it needed a dedicated server, and then technology improved and we were able to use a high-volume shared hosting account. The site has been in maintenance mode since 2012, and as lower level hosting plans got better and traffic gradually dropped off, eventually it could run on the least expensive shared hosting plan. This was $66/year in 2019. Pair increased the rate to $88 in 2022, and it stayed there for a while. I’m sure there were cheaper options elsewhere, but Pair had provided many years of good service, and it seemed a small price to pay to keep the archives online without putting a lot of time into investigating an alternative host and moving the site.

On December 2, Pair sent an e-mail:

In recent months, we’ve experienced rising operational costs as we upgrade our hardware to improve the quality and reliability of our services. To support these improvements, we will be adjusting our rates effective January 1, 2025.
For our valued existing customers, these new rates will only take effect upon your service renewal.

The new rate was $159/year, a huge increase in percentage terms. Other hosts have been raising rates, too, but not by that much. It’s not really clear to me what’s going on here, as for decades the hardware/storage/bandwidth got better and prices went down. My guess is that we’re currently getting a lot more than we need, but there’s no lower tier to downgrade to. In Pair’s case, the timing shortly after it was acquired is suspicious. Anyway, with our renewal in June, I made a note to investigate other options but figured that staying another year with Pair wouldn’t be that big of a deal.

On May 1, Pair sent another e-mail:

Starting June 1st, 2025, we will launch our NEW Pair Platinum Mail services, replacing the current free email offerings. This change is driven by rising our commitment to continuously improve our products despite operational costs and technical challenges in maintaining high-quality service.

[…]

To ease this transition, we are introducing new email service bundles, offering discounted rates as you increase the number of mailboxes in your plan. This pricing model ensures continued service quality while providing flexibility and affordability as your needs grow.

All the hosts we’ve used have always included more than enough mailboxes for free along with the Web hosting. This change raised the expected $159 to $639, even though we barely get any non-spam mail these days. And it’s anything but “flexible”: you can’t actually buy the number of mailboxes you need:

While each mailbox is priced competitively, we also offer bundle options designed to reduce the price per mailbox as your needs grow—delivering even greater value for businesses requiring multiple accounts.

It looks like there are bulk discounts, but when you actually go to configure it, it turns out that adding more mailboxes makes the per-mailbox price go up. This is because you can’t buy 11 mailboxes at the 10-mailbox rate; you would have to buy 20 and leave 9 unused.

The short notice and trying to market this rigidity as as benefit leave a bad taste, and it just doesn’t seem like the same company anymore. So now I really am looking for alternatives, or perhaps I’ll move it onto the server for one of my other sites. Pair also got rid of their discount for yearly billing, thus incentivizing us to move sooner. I’ve kind of been dreading the move because the site uses Python 2 and MySQL, and the last time I tried compiling the dependencies on a modern version of Linux I ran into multiple blockers. But, actually, it was surprisingly easy to update all my other server code to Python 3, so I should probably just do that here, too.

Previously:

ATPM Business MySQL OpenSSL Pair Networks Python Web

19 Comments

Apple Appeals EU Digital Markets Act Interoperability Rules

Benjamin Mayo (MacRumors):

Apple has appealed parts of the Digital Markets Act law citing user privacy concerns. Specifically, Apple is contesting the interoperability requirements that say data like notification content and WiFi networks should be made available to third-parties.

Apple says the DMA as written allows others to “access personal information that even Apple doesn’t see”. This is because features like notification rendering and WiFi network data are currently handled on-device and stored in an encrypted fashion, so Apple cannot see that stuff. However, the DMA does not necessarily require third-party agents who would be able to access this same data to commit to the same standards of privacy and security.

The implication is that, say, Garmin wants your personal information and Apple doesn’t. But I think Apple’s framing of this is all wrong. The companies don’t necessarily want your information either, and it’s not as if it would be shared without your consent. The real issue is that Apple is trying to lock people in by preventing them from even choosing to share their own data. If you could opt into sharing notifications of iMessages with third-parties, it would “hand data-hungry companies sensitive information.” But, in contrast, if Apple by default backs up actual iMessages and attachments to their server, not E2EE, somehow that’s “even Apple doesn’t see”? I’m sure there are aspects of the EU requirements that merit criticism, but I have little sympathy given how disingenuous Apple is being.

John Gruber (Mastodon):

To cite just one example, the Commission’s March ruling requires Apple to make AirDrop available to third-party devices, as though AirDrop was an open standard. (It also requires Apple to allow AirDrop to be replaced on iOS devices, like an interchangeable component, with third-party file sharing software.)

The part I saw was not saying that Apple has to open up AirDrop but that it has to allow third parties to build their own wireless fire transfer solutions and that they shouldn’t be put at an API disadvantage vs. AirDrop. As with Tile, I don’t really see how such a non-built-in system would get enough traction, so enabling AirDrop competitors hardly seems like it should be a priority, but I don’t see it as harmful, either. I want to be able to install interesting third-party apps on my phone. “Something only Apple could do” should be about the amazing things that Apple can design and build, not about how it actively blocks others from competing and innovating.

The EC’s March mandate basically says that third-party devices must be permitted to do everything Apple’s own devices do when it comes to communicating or interoperating with iPhones and iPads, even if that requires allowing those third-party companies to install and run system-level background processes with broad privileges on iOS. In fact, as Mayo alludes to above, in order to have the same capabilities as Apple’s own devices do, third-party system software extensions might need broader privileges.

I’ve long seen that there are two ways Apple can comply with this mandate, if the EU court declines Apple’s appeal. The first is what most people are thinking, and surely what the European Commission’s bureaucrats are thinking: that Apple will somehow make all third-party devices as capable as Apple’s own when it comes to pairing with and communicating with iPhones and iPads. (And that when Apple is set to unveil new devices, they’ll share the details with third parties in advance so they can do the same things.) The second, though, is that Apple will limit its own devices in the EU and only in the EU to the same features available to third-party devices through open standards like Bluetooth. New features and entire devices will either come late, or never, to the EU.

AirDrop Apple Continuity Digital Markets Act (DMA) European Union iMessage iOS iOS 18 Lawsuit Legal Notification Center Privacy Wi-Fi

Considering I use [AirDrop] almost every day and that there are zero alternatives that actually work (remember when we had to use Bluetooth?), I am hardly amused.
I am even less amused by the fact that the EU has pretty much ignored more widely rampant abuses (off the top of my head, the way TVs are sending out advertising data or the way ISPs do traffic shaping and sell your data) while focusing on a feature that is actually useful and works well.

Previously:

22 Comments

2024 App Store Transparency Report

Apple (MacRumors):

In the last five years, the App Store has protected users by preventing over $9 billion in fraudulent transactions, including over $2 billion in 2024 alone, according to Apple’s annual App Store fraud analysis. This reflects the App Store’s continued investment in fostering the most secure experience for users while providing developers with tools and resources, including a powerful commerce system that helps customers transact safely and securely in 175 regions around the globe.

[…]

In 2024, Apple terminated more than 146,000 developer accounts over fraud concerns and rejected an additional 139,000 developer enrollments, preventing bad actors from submitting their apps to the App Store in the first place.

Apple also rejected over 711 million customer account creations and deactivated nearly 129 million customer accounts last year, blocking these risky and malicious accounts from carrying out nefarious activity. That includes spamming or manipulating ratings and reviews, charts, and search results that risk compromising the integrity of the App Store.

[…]

Before any app makes its way onto the App Store, it is vetted by a member of Apple’s App Review team, all of whom are deeply familiar with the App Review Guidelines, and focused on ensuring apps meet Apple’s standards for quality and safety. On average, this team reviews nearly 150,000 app submissions each week, helping bring new apps and updates to the App Store.

I think some developers would beg to differ on the emphasized point.

Other common tactics used by fraudulent developers can include concealing hidden features and functionality in their code, which are only enabled after the app passes App Review. Apple monitors for such behavior, and in 2024, rejected over 43,000 app submissions for containing hidden or undocumented features.

Are they saying that there were 43K apps that, like Fortnite, tricked App Review and had to be blocked after the fact? I don’t see that as an endorsement of the current system vs. what sideloading and code signing would offer.

These bad actors can also attempt to deceive users by disguising potentially risky software as seemingly innocuous apps. Last year, App Review removed over 17,000 apps for bait-and-switch maneuvers such as these, as part of its ongoing efforts to routinely monitor and take action against problematic apps.

Again, it sounds like these all got through App Review.

This has become an annual tradition in trying to convince people — specifically, developers and regulators — of the wisdom of allowing native software to be distributed for iOS only through the App Store. Apple published similar stats in 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024, reflecting the company’s efforts in each preceding year.

[…]

There are plenty of numbers just like these in Apple’s press release. They all look impressive in large part because just about any statistic would be at Apple’s scale. Apple is also undeniably using the App Store to act as a fraud reduction filter, with mixed results. I do not expect a 100% success rate, but I still do not know how much can be gleaned from context-free numbers.

I’m totally fine if Apple wants to point such numbers out as a way to upsell their own services, such as the App Store itself, and their payments infrastructure. But I’m worried this is more about the continued justification for why they need to keep the App Store locked down.

Now do Stripe.
The App Store processes about $100B/year, while Stripe does about $1T/year. So, roughly, Stripe’s business is 10x of Apple’s *
It also tells us that Apple’s fraud rate is 2% ($2B / $100B). Let’s assume that Stripe’s has a similar fraud rate: that means they prevented $20B last year, or $100B vs. Apple’s $9B.
Apple’s still thinking like they area the only ones on the Internet that can process money securely…

Jake Mor:

Finally figured out why your app keeps getting rejected... because Apple takes pride in it.

It’s possible, perhaps likely, that Apple executives BELIEVE that the crApp Store is not full of scams, in the same way they may believe that their operating systems are not full of bugs: they have “internal metrics” telling them what they want to hear. In both cases, Apple’s own QA is practically nonexistent due to overwork and understaffing, while their external issue reporting system is overly difficult and unresponsive, a black hole.
The execs only see problems when they come via the media.

John Gruber (Mastodon):

What some App Store critics argue is that if any substantial amount of fraud, scams, or rip-offs occur through apps distributed through the App Store, that proves that there are no protective benefits of the App Store model. That’s nonsense. There are high-crime cities and low-crime cities, but there exist zero no-crime cities. The question is whether Apple is catching most — or even just “enough” — scammers. Scammy apps, pirated apps, fraudulent app reviewers. You name it.

Aside from the very small alternative marketplaces in the EU, Apple has made sure that there’s no competition for the App Store. So we can’t actually compare whether they’re doing a good job. All we know is that they block a lot but also that a lot gets through. The main point I would make here is that I don’t think Apple has presented much evidence that the current system is safer than something more like the Mac model with notarization. If the App Store is a magnet for scammers because the search and reviews are so easy to game, and if almost all the damage could be blocked post–App Review, then it’s hard to see how the protections around discovery and the review process are really load-bearing.

Defenders vastly underestimate the extent to which App Store is a scammer’s paradise that makes it much easier to find victims and take their money. Apple handles hosting, search, downloads, and payments for scammers. “Free with IAP” auto-renewing subscriptions are inherently scammy. And Apple tells users to trust the App Store, lowering their guard.
As the sole source of iOS apps, App Store is a single point of failure. Once you sneak in, you’re golden.

James Remeika:

One very weird stat this year: apps using StoreKit & Apple Pay fell more than 50% since the ’23 report. This stat has been included in this report every year[…]

EagleFiler 1.9.17

EagleFiler 1.9.17 is a maintenance release of my digital filing cabinet and e-mail archiving app. This version improves capturing Web pages from Orion and Safari, works better with different font sizes, and improves tag auto-completion and searching.

Some interesting issues were:

If JavaScript is disabled in Safari, the do JavaScript AppleScript command doesn’t raise an error; it just returns an undefined value that will blow up the script later when you try to do something with it.
I continue to run into problems with NSURLComponents. Previous problems include the string property being nil when it shouldn’t be (according to the documentation). The latest problem is that sometimes creating a new object fails due to a __NSPlaceholderURLComponents object that can’t be initialized. There are a bunch of things to watch out for with this API.
NSFileCoordinator reports errors reading symlinks in iCloud Drive unless you tell it to resolve them.
Firefox has changed the way bookmarklets work so that opening an external URL now replaces the page content with the URL string. Sometimes it also fails to open external URLs at all unless you reset the private/security settings.
The Mac App Store version was in review for 3.5 hours. Then I got an e-mail that it was “now eligible for distribution.” However, it did not actually get released to the store. App Store Connect still showed it as “In Review” for another 30 minutes. I don’t recall this ever happening before. It used to immediately come out of review and then say something like “Processing for App Store.”

Previously:

EagleFiler 1.9.16

Cocoa EagleFiler Firefox iCloud Drive Mac Mac App Mac App Store macOS 15 Sequoia Orion Programming Safari URL

Mac macOS 15 Sequoia Programming Swift Programming Language SwiftUI

SwiftUI macOS Sheet Buttons

Sam Rowlands:

Sheet dialog buttons don’t meet the macOS human interface guidelines by default, I’ve tried some solutions in the past, but then I stumbled across a really simple way to do it and I’m sharing that now.
[…]
Yes, it’s that simple, use a toolbar and the placement attributes to specify which buttons perform which action and SwiftUI will not only place the buttons correctly, but will resize the default and cancel buttons to match the Apple Human Interface Guidelines.

Except now the window shows a horizontal line for the toolbar. Still, this is the easiest way I’ve seen so far.

Previously:

6 Comments

OmniFocus 4.6

Ainsley Bourque Olson (release notes):

Notes are a great way to add additional context to an item in OmniFocus, and OmniFocus 4.6 makes it easier than ever to add content from outside of OmniFocus to a note, without bringing unnecessary font styles along for the ride. With this update, OmniFocus now defaults to an improved “Merge Styles” paste behavior, preserving only essential styles like bold, italic, underline, and strikethrough, as well as links with titles, and attachments.

While we think the “Merge Styles” paste behavior will be a great fit for most workflows, OmniFocus 4.6 also allows for customization of this behavior with a new paste behavior setting. And the default paste behavior is now context aware, only stripping styles when pasting text copied from an external source—styles are retained when pasting text copied from within OmniFocus, allowing you to move styled note text between OmniFocus items with ease.

It also fixes a really annoying sync bug that could make the window move between spaces.

Previously:

OmniFocus 4.5

iOS iOS 17 iOS App Mac Mac App macOS 15 Sequoia OmniFocus Pasteboard Shortcuts Spaces Spotlight Syncing visionOS visionOS 2 visionOS App watchOS watchOS 11 watchOS App

1 Comment

The iPhone 15 Pro’s Depth Maps

Mark Litwintschik (Hacker News):

Finn Jaeger, who is the head of VFX at Replayboys, a film production firm in Hamburg, Germany, posted a screenshot a few weeks ago showing how multiple depth maps were being produced by his iPhone.
He announced he was working on a project called HEIC Shenanigans. This project contains scripts to separate out images and their metadata from HEIC containers as well as convert them into EXR Files. As of this writing, the project contains 374 lines of Python.
In this post, I’ll walk through Finn’s codebase with an example image from an iPhone 15 Pro.

Uncorrelated:

Other commenters here are correct that the LIDAR is too low-resolution to be used as the primary source for the depth maps. In fact, iPhones use four-ish methods, that I know of, to capture depth data, depending on the model and camera used. Traditionally these depth maps were only captured for Portrait photos, but apparently recent iPhones capture them for standard photos as well.

Camera Graphics HEIF iOS iOS 18 iPhone 15 Pro LiDAR Scanner Open Source Programming Python

Tuesday, June 3, 2025

Sky Preview

Sky (MacRumors):

Introducing Sky for Mac.

[…]

Sky floats over whatever you’re doing so you can:

Ask questions from anywhere on your Mac

Take action in your apps (send a message, schedule an event, etc)

Use your own custom tools by adding prompts, scripts, shortcuts, or MCPs

Federico Viticci (Mastodon):

For the past two weeks, I’ve been able to use Sky, the new app from the people behind Shortcuts who left Apple two years ago. As soon as I saw a demo, I felt the same way I did about Editorial, Workflow, and Shortcuts: I knew Sky was going to fundamentally change how I think about my macOS workflow and the role of automation in my everyday tasks.
Only this time, because of AI and LLMs, Sky is more intuitive than all those apps and requires a different approach, as I will explain in this exclusive preview story ahead of a full review of the app later this year.
[…]
Sky is an AI-powered assistant that can perform actions and answer questions for any window and any app open on your Mac. On the surface, it may look like any other launcher or LLM with a desktop app: you press a hotkey, and a tiny floating UI comes up.
[…]
What sets Sky apart from anything I’ve tried or seen on macOS to date is that it uses LLMs to understand which windows are open on your Mac, what’s inside them, and what actions you can perform based on those apps’ contents.

Matthew Cassinelli:

Pressing ⌘⌘ to grab your current context is a delightfully natural interaction.

Sky saves the current window or file as well as its metadata, so you can ask AI about it right away.

[…]

To go further, you can add Custom Tools – which can include custom instructions, MCPs, AppleScripts, & shell scripts – and yes, Shortcuts!
You can extend Sky’s capabilities however you want – and designing them is easy with prompting built right into the editor interface.

This feels like the so-far-unfulfilled promise of Apple Intelligence — but more. The ways I want to automate iOS are limited. But the kinds of things I want help with on my Mac are boundless.

As with Grammarly, it’s amazing that they seem to be doing more than what Apple promised, yet without requiring the apps to rearchitect everything around intents.

The Apple Intelligence team meeting after seeing Sky, after very publicly failing to ship their own version of this stuff.

App Intents Apple Intelligence AppleScript Artificial Intelligence ChatGPT Claude Mac Mac App macOS 15 Sequoia Model Context Protocol (MCP) Privacy Shortcuts Sky

The real question is why couldn’t the founders of Shortcuts build this stuff at Apple, and what were the systemic failures that pushed them out to go it alone.

John Voorhees:

This week on @appstories, I share my first impressions of Sky and we share our wishes for Shortcuts and Apple Intelligence.

Previously:

Update (2025-06-04): Rui Carmo (Hacker News):

I mean, people have free will and all, and can choose to work wherever they want, but this makes my earlier rant about their having neglected automation feel like the first clue to a corporate culture murder scene.
Not having made it possible for them to thrive feels like vanilla corporate politics, but having brilliant people leave Apple and ship something that is, even in preview, much better than anything that Apple Intelligence promised (including the made up bits they paraded as marketing material) is just gross mismanagement (now you know why I held back on this draft).
[…]
I can see Apple balking at doing something like Sky (if they ever even considered it) because it not only has to share bits of your screen with an LLM, but also because it would have to open up the Mac to third-party automation in a way that it has never done before, and that would be a huge departure from their current approach.
[…]
But the privacy angle is interesting, because Apple was in a perfect position to do something exactly like Sky and ensure that it was done in a way that respected user privacy. Even though local models are still not quite there yet (remember that RAM requirements are still very high as far as running truly useful models are concerned), they do have the confidential computing tech to run inference in a privacy-preserving way–which might be the only bit of Apple Intelligence that actually works at this point.

3 Comments

Compare Pages Documents in Kaleidoscope

Florian Albrecht:

Need to compare two versions of a Pages document? We previously provided a solution based on Shortcuts, but recent updates to Pages (version 14.4 at the time of writing) have rendered that workflow unusable. Specifically, the AppleScript command Pages offers to export unformatted text—an essential part of our shortcut—no longer produces any text output.

They have a workaround that uses more steps to send the data to Kaleidoscope’s share extension. But this is emblematic of how AppleScript support continues to break or work worse than it used to. Apple’s official position is that AppleScript isn’t the future, but they have nothing that’s close to being able to replace it.

Previously:

AppleScript Bug Extensions Kaleidoscope Mac macOS 15 Sequoia Pages.app Shortcuts

AppleScript Artificial Intelligence Claude Cursor Google Gemini/Bard HyperContext JavaScript for Automation Mac macOS 15 Sequoia Model Context Protocol (MCP) Open Source

Model Context Protocol (MCP) Tools for Mac

macOS Automator MCP Server (tweet):

This project provides a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, macos_automator, that allows execution of AppleScript and JavaScript for Automation (JXA) scripts on macOS. It features a knowledge base of pre-defined scripts accessible by ID and supports inline scripts, script files, and argument passing. The knowledge base is loaded lazily on first use for fast server startup.

Peter Steinberger:

Cursor/Gemini is now using AppleScript to talk to Claude to run it's own mcp and see if the default responses work well and then uses the ax tool to get text back to verify how Claude's doing + to debug it's own project.

Terminator MCP:

Terminator is an npx-installable Model Context Protocol (MCP) plugin designed to provide AI agents with robust, simplified, and intelligent control over macOS terminal sessions. It uses a Swift-based command-line interface (CLI) internally to interact with terminal applications like Apple Terminal, iTerm2, and Ghosty.

Matt Birchler:

What we just watched was me ask Claude for the Mac to look at my email inbox, find the emails with feedback on my iOS app, and create reminders to work on those in Apple Reminders. Given it took about 45 seconds to do this and that it required me to manually key in what I wanted it to do, this is a proof-of-concept more than something I can immediately use day to day, but I'm really excited about this.
To get this working, all I had to do was install Hypercontext on my Mac, give it access to my email and Reminders, and it was good to go. I believe what this app does is set up a local MCP server on your Mac which can then be used by any app that can work with MCP. In this video it’s Claude, but it could be any LLM (including local models) that works with tooling like this.

Peter Steinberger:

After developing several MCP tools, I’ve compiled this comprehensive guide to best practices that ensure your tools are reliable, user-friendly, and maintainable.

Previously:

Update (2025-06-04): Longplay:

Longplay for Mac 0.8.0 is available in Early Access.

🤖 Standout feature is a built-in MCP server to control playback, create smart collections, and interact with your music library from other apps, notably Claude Desktop.

Update (2025-06-06): Ken Case:

It seems to me that MCP is a modern, cross-platform corollary to the Mac ecosystem’s AppleScript dictionaries. It’s a great standard for discovering API endpoints and calling them in a standard way. (And as a bonus, it doesn’t involve keeping track of four-byte codes.)
Because it’s associated with the AI buzz, lots of developers are integrating it. But it’s not limited to and doesn’t have to be used with AI; there’s a great opportunity to make it easy for humans to script all those apps too.

The Automation Gap

John Voorhees:

Yes, we each share some shortcuts we’ve built, but there’s also a healthy dose of third-party automation apps, services, and AI projects sprinkled throughout. I take that as a sign that automation is alive and well on Apple platforms. At the same time, though, it’s also a symptom of a bigger issue, especially on the Mac, that I don’t think can be ignored given Apple’s push to make apps interoperable via Apple Intelligence.
Nearly three years ago, I wrote AppleScript: Shortcuts Bridge or Crutch?, questioning whether accessing AppleScript via Shortcuts on the Mac was a feature to be celebrated or a red flag, fearing that Apple would use the integration to postpone or never release many of the system-level actions that were missing from Shortcuts’ debut on the Mac.
[…]
Shortcuts’ progress on the Mac has been anything but steady and yearly.
[…]
Shortcuts on the Mac was plagued by design and technical issues that had nothing to do with the actions themselves. It was a rocky start that Shortcuts for Mac has mostly recovered from, but almost four years later, it’s pretty clear that Shortcuts is not the future of Mac automation that Craig Federighi claimed it would be.

He also said that the Catalyst apps, System Settings, and SwiftUI were really great on the Mac.

Jason Snell (Hacker News):

A few days ago, while writing my Podcast Notes update, I realized that I had (inadvertently?) created an automation that begins with a Stream Deck keypress that executes a Keyboard Maestro macro that kicks off a JavaScript script in Audio Hijack that runs an AppleScript applet that executes a Shortcuts shortcut. In recent days I’ve also edited shortcuts that run Python and AppleScript scripts, including some where the shortcut is really nothing more than a Mac UI-friendly wrapper around a bare script, much in the same way you can use Automator as a simple wrapper around AppleScript scripts.

That all these things are possible on the Mac is amazing, and it’s a testament to how flexible and powerful the Mac can be. But it also says something quite profound about how little progress Apple has made with Shortcuts on the Mac (or in general) in the last few years. (And of course, all these workarounds fail on iOS entirely.)

Maybe the drive toward App Intents will help make Shortcuts more powerful and less reliant on tools like AppleScript, Keyboard Maestro, and the rest. But even that isn’t enough, since the Shortcuts app is way too rickety and limited.

Just debugged a longstanding issue with a shortcut that regexes the <title> out of the HTML source for a URL. The issue is that, believe it or not, there are a lot of websites out there that have many <title> elements per page. The Verge has 40 per article. (View Source on a Verge article and stare too long and you risk going blind.)
Trying to debug this sort of thing in Shortcuts is like trying to tie your shoelaces with chopsticks.
Anyway, I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue.

To me it really paints a picture where the people working on Shortcuts.app do not themselves create even moderate complex shortcuts for themselves. I suspect they sit there and read and address radars but they don’t themselves really use Shortcuts. If they did it would be so much better.

Shortcuts on Mac has always looked and felt like it was made and designed by people who never used a Mac. Obviously that’s not true because Xcode only runs on a Mac but there’s no point pulling punches on this.

I think there is a strong bit of this being that the Shortcuts team had to dog food SwiftUI on the Mac way before it was ready. As if it even is now.

Scott Willsey:

There are so many issues with shortcuts in general it really doesn’t matter to the end-user the specific reasons, Apple is whiffing it big time. I constantly get sync issues undoing changes or just bizarre logic/capability issues that make me push it aside and write a python script instead.

Ultimately, it’s another indictment of the bean counters, in my mind, who see the analytics and don’t know why they’d give more resources to what is, and will always be, a small user base.

Matthew Cassinelli:

There’s as much wrong with SwiftUI as there are ways for Shortcuts to go wrong.

I think it’s also a larger story where all of us see it as the Workflow programming language, not Siri Shortcuts the feature or their solution for AI.

Until they notice that they have a programming language for an app, it can’t get the level of resources to make it scale.

FlohGro:

If you want to build complicated shortcuts you have to use the graphical editor which is a pain especially for bigger shortcuts. This is freaking annoying and as a software developer myself I prefer writing code above dragging boxes. A language that could transfer into the graphical UI would also be easy to integrate with AI tools so inexperienced uses could create shortcuts with it.

Matthew Cassinelli:

I don’t think I can afford to use Shortcuts for iPad anymore without copy-and-paste for multiple actions.

Just enough of a blocker that I’ll always be better off using my Mac.

Jimmy:

Which is saying a lot, because the Mac app is hot garbage.

The amount of regressions I find in every update is astounding. Forgetting properties, resetting custom date formats, etc.

And why in 2025 is drag and drop of actions so hopelessly janky?

I generally edit big Shortcuts on my Mac as well, but it’s like playing with a proof-of-concept sometimes.

Previously:

Update (2025-06-04): Mark Gurman (via Matthew Cassinelli, MacRumors):

A revamped version of its Shortcuts app, which today lets users create actions such as launching certain features within apps or playing a particular playlist. The new version will let consumers create those actions using Apple Intelligence models. (This had long been planned for 2025, but delays may push it to 2026.)”

App Intents Apple Intelligence AppleScript Craig Federighi iPadOS iPadOS 18 Mac macOS 15 Sequoia Shortcuts SwiftUI

As long as they don’t break AppleScript and GUI scripting, I am happy with Apple wasting their time and resources on trying to use so-called “Apple Intelligence” to improve macOS features that I don’t use and have no need for.
Well, maybe not “happy”, but relieved — relief being the only thing that sensible macOS power users can expect from Apple’s newest moves these days. Everything they touch, they break. So please, do focus on touching stuff I don’t use.

Update (2025-06-09): Dan Moren:

Recent macOS updates had a bug that killed one of my critical Shortcuts automations, which moves audio files into appropriate folders.

14 Comments

Monday, June 2, 2025

Separate Expressions for +alloc and -init

Ronald Oussoren:

The following code will crash hard when compiled using ARC:
#import <Foundation/Foundation.h>

int main(void)
{
     NSOutputStream* stream;

      stream = [NSOutputStream alloc];
      stream = [stream initToMemory];

      NSLog(@"%@", stream);
}
This is split calls to alloc and initToMemory are effectively what happens when using NSOutputStream.alloc().initToMemory() in Python.

[…]

This appears to be a genuine bug in macOS, filed as FB17759654.

Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) Bug Cocoa Mac macOS 15 Sequoia Memory Management Objective-C Programming PyObjC

Apple in China

Issie Lapowsky (Amazon, Reddit, John Gruber):

But Cook was in Beijing that day to do the opposite: to impress upon President Xi Jinping’s government that Apple was so committed to China that it planned to spend $275 billion in the country over the next five years. “I call it a Marshall Plan for China, because I could not find any corporate spending coming close to what Apple was spending,” said Financial Times journalist Patrick McGee, who writes about this and other moments illustrating Apple’s role in enabling China’s rise in his new book Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company.

[…]

Through interviews with more than 200 sources, more than 90% of whom worked for the tech giant at some point, the book traces the history of the company to flip the usual narrative about Apple and China on its head. By expending such exorbitant resources in China and training so many Chinese workers with its novel, hands-on approach to micromanaging foreign factories, Apple facilitated “an epic transfer of knowledge” to China, McGee told Vanity Fair.

[…]

Apple doesn’t just hope that suppliers come up with better, lighter, stronger components and then incorporate them into the next iPhone. It is intimately working in hundreds of factories across China, making those innovations happen, and that’s how the iPhone stays ahead of everybody else.

[…]

My favorite part of the book is about the “yellow cows,” [a slang term to describe organized scalpers] that effectively built a gig economy and distributed iPhones at marked-up prices around the country. The yellow cows found ways to make more money per iPhone than Apple.

The author, Patrick McGee, was recently on The Daily Show, The Talk Show, The AmberMac Show, and CNBC. After listening some of the interviews, this seems like the most interesting Apple book in a long time, with tons of details and anecdotes. I look forward to reading it.

Warner Crocker:

Not only does it hit that crucially important overlay of the story, it provides some fascinating, and at times frightening detail in many of the design, engineering, corporate, and political maneuverings far beneath the surface of all the machinations we read about on our iPhones.

[…]

If there is one big surprise that I think pierces the Apple aura, it’s just how little central control and understanding of what was happening on the ground in China in the helter-skelter days of early iPhone growth. What on the surface may have seemed like, and been adopted almost as mantra-like by the tech press, a giant corporation with a vision pushing buttons in Monday morning executive meetings, often feels like a company reacting to forces beyond its control that it brought into the tent.

Apple in China by @patrickmcgee.bsky.social probably the most interesting book I have read about Apple in the 25 years that I have been writing about the company. Beyond the geopolitical issues, it’s really interesting to learn all the details about how their products are built.

Previously:

Update (2025-06-12): Ben Thompson:

An Interview with “Apple in China” Author Patrick McGee about Apple’s reluctant shift to outsourcing and how its position relative to its supply chain has shifted over time.

Update (2025-06-16): Jim Nielsen:

There’s this part in there where he’s talking about a guy who worked for Apple and was known for being ruthless, stopping at nothing to negotiate the best deal for Apple. He was so aggressive yet convincing that suppliers often found themselves faced with regret, wondering how they got talked into a deal that in hindsight was not in their best interest.
One particular Apple executive sourced in the book noted how there are companies who don’t employ questionable tactics to gain an edge, but most of them don’t exist anymore.