★ Squashing:

The Alan Dye leaving for Meta thing, that was unexpected, and, to some degree, turbulent. But I have yet to speak to a single person within Apple, nor a single UI designer outside Apple, who thinks it’s anything but good news for Apple that Dye jumped ship for Meta. Not just that Dye is a fraud of a UI designer. Not just that he and his inner circle have vandalized MacOS, the crown jewel of human-computer interaction. Not just that he and his team are given — or have taken — credit for innovative, high-quality work on VisionOS that really belongs to the interaction team Mike Rockwell put together for VisionOS. Not just that Dye left Apple for a rival company, period — something unheard of amongst Apple’s bleed-in-six-colors executive ranks. But that he left for Meta, of all fucking companies? That’s the proof that Dye (and his urban cowboy magazine-designer cohort) never belonged at Apple in the first place.

Ouch.

It’s uncertain whether Apple will keep Liquid Glass unchanged in iOS 27, and it’s premature to conclude. The latest iOS 27 build reportedly doesn’t update Liquid Glass, so no definitive judgment should be made. If iOS 27 is a Snow Leopard release, significant UI changes are unlikely. Gurman should be better than that.

It’s Your Fault Really:

It fits the broader pattern of what Meta is becoming. AI slop in your feed, fake engagement bots, insecure messaging. The direction of travel is obvious. None of these things are surprises or mistakes. They are deliberate decisions made by a company that has decided the path forward is to extract as much attention and data as possible, and anything that gets in the way of that, including basic privacy protections, gets quietly deprecated because apparently not enough of you were using it.

And Meta is about to deprecate 20% of its workforce because of… too much spending on AI infrastructure that doesn’t move the revenue needle. What a wonderful American corporation.

A few notes about the MacBook Neo:

I’m not thrilled by the lack of backlighting in the keyboard. Maybe it’ll appear in the pricier model in a future iteration. The keys are white/tinted, so maybe the printing is contrasty enough to make the key symbols visible even in poor light. I was willing to put this in the ‘okay’ category, but I can’t help feeling this was an unnecessary corner for Apple to cut.

My wife also has some negative comments about the keyboard. Not only it doesn’t include backlighting, since the keycaps aren’t pure white, the contrast is lower which negatively affect the readability in low light conditions.

Just as streaming services helped lower the cost of music, AI is reducing the price of software even more than the subscription model does. The downside is that AI is driving hardware prices up, and it’s uncertain whether we will ever see the return of the always-cheaper hardware trend.

Since my bookmark manager is almost complete, I plan to record a demo to share here. I like its integration with my other web apps, such as the Micro.blog front-end for posting linkposts and the feature that exports selected links and quotes to a markdown file, which will be included in an upcoming ephemeral scrapbook edition.

‘Software Bonkers’:

Don’t get distracted by the mountains of steaming shit that hacks are using these tools to spew. There are amazing things being built by these tools that never would have, or in some cases could have, been built before.

So far, with the help of Claude Code, I have built: a Micro.blog front end, a Scribbles page front end, a perfect RSS feed reader, a personal dashboard, and a bookmark manager. I’me super happy to have tools that really fit my workflows, my working style and my blogger journey. Without Claude Code, I would need to resort to existing but not-as-satisfying tools. Next, I want to build my own Micro.blog visual theme plugin. Plus, this morning, while Things 3 was open on my MacBook, I realized that I could build my very own personal task manager. The only limit is my imagination.