For the first time in twenty years, I don’t have any business-related apps on my mobile phone, except one for 2FA. No email, no instant messaging, no documents, nothing! I feel some sort of hard-to-describe relief.

Journal on macOS Tahoe feels unfinished, barely a proof of concept to me. Who’s designing this at Apple? It feels it was put together the day before WWDC. Too many things to list here. Next betas can’t come soon enough, and I’m really curious to see how much improvements we’re going to see from beta2 to beta 3 and beyond.

Matt Birchler in Liquid glass one month later

If I could sum it up briefly, I’d say that liquid glass is highly dependent on the content it’s covering to determine how delightful it is as a UI. That’s a real challenge to overcome and it’s a big reason why we tend to see these highly-transparent interface designs get more and more opaque in time. The highs are very high in my book, but there are still plenty of “yikes” moments that I wish weren’t there and I hope get improved by the fall.

This makes me think that iOS 26 is really the new iOS 7 moment in Apple history. I also agree with Matt’s critique and observations. I don’t think that a UI is good when you have to meet a certain context in order to make it look good. A great UI is good most if not all the time.

What, You Have a Blog? Really?

I overheard people at the office talking about their weekend activities. I wasn’t in the conversation, but I’m always prepared for those. I never talk about my writing hobby or the many websites I maintain. Most people would find this strange. They’d say things like, “What, you have a blog? Really?” Yes, that’s right. I prefer to skip all that and talk about a walk in the park, in the forest, and maybe about photography. Blogging is like people collecting stamps back in the day. Sad.

Having to immerse myself in a different digital ecosystem, specifically Microsoft’s, helps me appreciate the strengths of both Apple and Microsoft. Does this mean I should consider switching to Android? I’ll leave that for you to guess. 🤭

One of the fun things when starting a new job with a new set of digital tools is to rethink old habits and change what was broken. Information classifications and tasks management are seeing a big rethink which is, of course, highly tied to Microsoft 365 tools (To Do, OneNote, Outlook and their tied integration).