Numeric Citizen Blog Posts Monthly Digest
Numeric Citizen Blog
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.
2025-07-02 ∞I’ve Got Better Things To Do Than This, and Yet
At the point when you have to blur the content area to make the UI stand out from it, how can you possibly argue that it gets out of the way? It makes no sense.
He puts words on something I couldn’t name myself.
2025-07-03 ∞I’m not sure why and what Americans will celebrate tomorrow.
2025-07-03 ∞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.
2025-07-04 ∞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.
2025-07-04 ∞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.
2025-07-04 ∞This is the new readability standards from Apple, a trillion dollars tech company. Here’s a screenshot of two Finder windows. Which one is active? Why is the tab of the inactive window darker than the active one? Why can I barely distinguish the tab of the active window? And those “floating over the content” controls in the top portion, are just, weird and out of this place.
2025-07-05 ∞
It appears that not only Liquid Glass breaks readability in many cases, but information density too is affected, something that I care even more. What comes after the iPhone 15 Pro Max to support this new UI paradigm? 🤦🏻♂️
2025-07-05 ∞I realize that I should use Inoreader’s ability to generate a RSS feed from a folder and subscribe to this feed in Reeder instead of subscribing to individual feeds in Reeder. This would make Inoreader the source of truth. I’ll work on that this weekend.
2025-07-05 ∞My view tonight. 😍
2025-07-05 ∞
I wonder what’s going on with Daniel Eran Dilger. It’s been close to five years without posting on his blog: Roughly Drafted. His Twitter account is now private. Nothing to see on LinkedIn either. 🧐
2025-07-06 ∞I want to like Apple’s vision of their newest OS incarnations, but I find it hard at this point. I’m hoping that beta3 will change and help improve some of my feelings.
2025-07-06 ∞Do you think that a few years from now, Liquid Glass will age well? Was this even a consideration by Apple’s designers when they put that up together?
2025-07-06 ∞Cloudflare Is Blocking AI Crawlers by Default
Last year, internet infrastructure firm Cloudflare launched tools enabling its customers to block AI scrapers. Today the company has taken its fight against permissionless scraping several steps further. It has switched to blocking AI crawlers by default for its customers and is moving forward with a Pay Per Crawl program that lets customers charge AI companies to scrape their websites.
I paid a visit to my Cloudflare dashboard and I saw the option to turn on the blocking of AI bots. I’m just not sure that I want to silence myself from LLM training. What if everyone does the same?
2025-07-06 ∞With the addition of the traffic lights buttons on iPadOS 26, it’s now easier to spot which window is active because inactive windows has their traffic light buttons grayed with three little dots as seen on this screenshot.
2025-07-07 ∞
It’s one of those Monday that will take a hard time to get started. 😅 I had such a great weekend. Let’s get this done.
2025-07-07 ∞
Maybe Apple could provide a Low, Medium and High settings for Liquid Glass and most people would probably be happy with it.
2025-07-07 ∞I see encouraging signs with today’s releases of “whateverOS beta3”1. But there is still much work to be done as shown in exhibit #9.
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iOS 26 beta3, iPadOS 26 beta3, macOS Tahoe beta 3. ↩
Next weekend when going to the chalet, I’ll bring my iPad, Magic Keyboard and my LG UltraFine 4K monitor so that I can experiment with iPadOS 26 with an external monitor. The last time I tried this was with iPadOS 18 with Stage Manager. It didn’t work well. Can’t wait to see the difference.
2025-07-08 ∞Here’s a thought: I would like to ask people of all ages, specifically those between 16 and 70, how they feel about Apple Liquid Glass. Do younger individuals prefer the original version, while older ones favor the toned-down version? I suspect this might be the case.
2025-07-08 ∞I often repeat this thought in my head when I’m in challenging times: “everything around me has been done by people not smarter than me.”. It’s inspired by Steve Jobs’ words from an interview he did in the early 1990s, where he was reflecting on how empowering it is to realize that the world is built by people just like us — and that we can reshape it too.
2025-07-09 ∞Currently starting my week-end long experiment with an 2024 M4 iPad Pro running iPadOS 26 with an external display. This feels so different and yet familiar to the… Mac? The iPad? I’m not sure, just yet. Expect more posts in the coming days.
2025-07-10 ∞Well, using iPadOS 26 beta3, it seems that I can’t use my iPad in «clamshell» mode while hooked to an external display… really?
2025-07-10 ∞On iPadOS 26, you can resize the Settings windows as you like. I wish we could do the same on the Mac!
2025-07-10 ∞One simple thing that is missing from iPadOS 26: CMD-Q to quit an application. Other things that need work: the CMD-TAB switcher is not glassified and lacks contrats with the background view. Same comment goes for the Spotlight search field which can be really hard to see. Oh and here’s the thing: if you happen to work both on the Mac and an iPad: you kind expect that both platforms behave the same way. As an example, I want Spotlight on iPad to be the same as on the Mac by offering the four search modes.
2025-07-11 ∞The upcoming CMS feature in Realmac Software Elements is sooooo cool, flexible and powerful. Even RSS feeds are supported! You can see that in action in their latest Dev Diary video.
2025-07-11 ∞Bye Bye Grammarly?
I received a reminder this morning about my upcoming Grammarly renewal. After reviewing past invoices, I decided to cancel my subscription on a whim. It’s an expensive service. As I’m planning some changes on other areas of my digital presence, I’ll reallocate the money to that instead.
For the next new weeks, my subscription ends on August 14th, I’ll be turning off Grammarly and see how things goes. I might use AI service from Raycast, ChatGPT or even Apple Intelligence Writing Tools to compensate. I do use the free version of LanguageTool, too. I’ll report my conclusions in due time.
2025-07-14 ∞How depressing this is. These are filtered Google News results with the keyword “ChatGPT”. Look at some headlines… Now, consider this quote.
“AI will not replace humans, but those who use AI will replace those who don’t.” – Ginni Rometty
2025-07-15 ∞
I’m really liking my experience with Realmac Software’s Elements to build my new landing page. I’m not an expert at website design but with Elements, I feel empowered. The learning curve is not the easiest one but following all the videos they publish on their YouTube channel plus visiting their forum helps a lot.
2025-07-15 ∞Wondering if Digg could be a place for blogging beyond doing link posts… 🤔
2025-07-16 ∞It’s been a while but recent news and trends about AI-based bots trying to ruin the life of psychologically vulnerable people triggered an update to my /nope page.
2025-07-17 ∞Jesper on the upcoming iPhone 17 Air:
So, while I don’t necessarily agree with the consequences of the inexorable march towards new frontiers in terms of super-slimness that no one asked for, the ergonomic benefits of a larger display in a “small”-ish footprint are interesting enough that pursuing it may be necessary to avoid a relative brick.
I think Apple is doing the iPhone 17 Air because they wanted to make the iPhone Fold first.
2025-07-19 ∞I just discovered that you can have more than one newsletter on Ghost. Maybe I could use it to restart my Photo Legend Series?
2025-07-20 ∞Who Knew This Was Still a Challenge These Days
I took a trip earlier this year, and my sister, a seasoned amateur photographer, asked when she could see my photos. Even if I’m on Glass and Pixelfed, I’m sure those two platforms aren’t what she would like to use to browse my photos. To makes things more complicated, I do use iCloud Photos where I could share an album but also depend on file-based organization for RAW photos. I need a place to combine my best photos and share as a website that could be put together quickly and easily while having a great design and look. One possible solution is to use Fastmail Files, which will allow me to upload files easily and build the static website automagically. More on that soon.
2025-07-20 ∞The Apple Intelligence Story Nobody Wants to Talk About
When I read the news about Apple Intelligence, it is most often related to the perception that Apple is way behind their competitors in the field of artificial intelligence1. It is rarely about what sets Apple Intelligence apart from its competitors: privacy protection. It’s as if this is not important to the majority of users or the tech press. However, it is an important differentiating factor that I believe will work in Apple’s favor in the long term. Fortunately, some articles highlight this fact, such as this article from 9to5Mac.
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One could argue, including myself, that it’s not entirely true when you step back and see the whole pictures. People tend to compare to ChatGPT conversational interaction model. Apple do use a lot of AI technologies in their operating systems and has been doing so for many years. Apple is not good at addressing this perception problem. ↩
I’m testing the Comet browser with Perplexity integrated, though I’m not entirely sure what that means, yet. It took me less than 30 seconds to summarize a 23:40 minute video, as shown in this screenshot. If millions of people do the same, video creators will likely see a significant drop in view counts. And millions of people will probably save a lot of time watching a video that could have been a one-paragraph blog post. 🤦🏻♂️
2025-07-21 ∞
Updated this living catalog of design flaws while using and experimenting with Apple Liquid Glass. I reworked the exhibit heading section with tags. Currently, sporting 26 exhibits and counting.
2025-07-21 ∞I’ve been using the Digg beta for a few weeks, and I have mixed feelings about it. I appreciate its design and the way users curate links and content. However, I worry that it might become as toxic as Reddit once it opens to everyone. Just this morning, I participated in a thread where some users were posting angry comments—albeit mildly—toward someone who disagreed with the majority. The argument is simple: Reddit is a toxic place and people want an alternative. Digg came up trying to be different but some people think that under the surface, it will become as toxic as Reddit. Boom. I wonder if the Internet can ever be a place for debating.
2025-07-22 ∞Today is beta4 day, and if this catalog of Liquid Glass failures is any indication, it either a lost cause or beta4 might be the turning point.
2025-07-22 ∞I’ve been trying Claude AI recently and beyond the answers I get to my prompts, I really like the output style, much more than OpenAI. By order of preference, it goes like this: Claude, Perplexity then OpenAI.
2025-07-23 ∞I wonder if Apple has a “disable Liquid Glass” kill switch at their disposal just in case things turn awful before September launch so they can get more time refining or scrapping Liquid Glass altogether until next year? What would be left in os26 then?
2025-07-23 ∞At beta 4, my general sentiment toward Apple Liquid Glass is generally worse than it was with iOS 7, back in 2013. 😵💫
2025-07-24 ∞OneNote, an app made by Microsoft, running on Windows 11, an OS made by Microsoft, doesn’t support text selection by double clicking on a word and dragging across, word-by-word. It’s 2025, for god’s sake. But we have AI everywhere, there’s that. 🤷🏻♂️
2025-07-24 ∞Two apps. Tapestry on the left, a beta that supports Liquid Glass. Micro.blog on the right, still not supporting Liquid Glass. Look at the elements spacing and content areas. This is the future that awaits us.
2025-07-24 ∞
As reported from MacRumors: A new button for camera-related functionality coming to the iPhone 17 Pro? Will they fix or improve the Camera Control? I hope they work on that, too, just like when the iterated on the haptic engine in the early days of the iPhone.
2025-07-27 ∞Something I just learned this morning about Micro.blog:
<script src="https://cdn.micro.blog/quoteback.js"></script>Do cross the streams! Bluesky starter packs now available to follow within Micro.blog. Here’s one in Micro.blog on the web with people who post about books. No batch follow yet, but a fun way to discover new users. An experiment that we’ll refine. You can search for a Bluesky pack URL to open it.
Starter Packs are great to quickly browse and see who might be interesting to follow… but following the whole starter pack is a no-go for me. The way I understand it is that you are following all the pack members in one hop. I prefer to pick and choose.
2025-07-27 ∞As much as I have issues with Liquid Glass on iOS, iPadOS, macOS, I kind of like it a lot on watchOS. 🤷🏻♂️
2025-07-28 ∞Windows PC is a powerful platform for gaming, with high frame rate, gorgeous graphics and animation, and so on and on… so why is a modern pro laptop running the latest OS, Windows 11, still struggles when resizing windows? It’s 2025. But, hey, we have AI everywhere, right? 🤷🏻♂️😒
2025-07-28 ∞I’m a lucky guy.
2025-07-28 ∞
Liquid Glass disillusioned here: Dear Apple, if an app constantly needs to darken or lighten the background or adjust control transparency for the user interface to be barely usable, perhaps this indicates a flawed approach to user interface design? 😵💫
2025-07-29 ∞It has been a long time since I published a long article on numericcitizen.me. Aside from my newsletter, in-depth articles have become rare. It seems that I am only able to produce short texts. Should I be worried about that?
2025-07-30 ∞Got this a few times already, is this legit?
2025-07-30 ∞
Referring to an earlier post today, I think I know why I’m publishing less often long articles. Building each newsletter edition takes quite some time and is rather disruptive-I’m constantly on the lookout to find new and interesting stuff to put into each ephemeral scrapbook. Learning to use Elements proved to be more demanding that I thought (but it was worth it!). And more recently, maintaining my visual catalog of Liquid Glass failures also requires some dedication, thank you, Apple.
2025-07-30 ∞Om Malik’s analysis on recent corporate memo from Zuckerberg at Meta:
There is about 25 percent genuine strategic content, the rest is aspirational marketing and corporate positioning. For instance, infrastructure commitments and device strategy show the seriousness of the effort. However, claims about superintelligence being “in sight” are inflated for competitive reasons.
Me: This is how a tech bubble is inflated, until it blows up. Wait for it.
2025-07-31 ∞Still no clear effects of Apple Intelligence delays on Apple’s bottom line, apparently. Apple is not doomed, just yet.
2025-07-31 ∞