Daring Fireball

“Thibault”, in post on Mastodon responding to Brent Simmons’s “stock Mac UI” post that I just linked to : It reminded me of my own explorations with the macOS design language, especially the modern title/toolbar which I believe is one of the most foundational design regression on the platform. I played with the idea of redesigning the Finder with the original hierarchy but keeping the current Liquid Glass styling. Though it’s still far from what I’d like to see on my Mac, I thought I’d share. Here’s his subtle mockup: The changes in Thibault’s redesign, if you describe them verbally, sound min

Brent Simmons: To recap: the reasons for using stock Mac UI are 1) user familiarity, which we’ve known for a while just isn’t a thing, and 2) hoping to be able to expend less developer effort, which we’ve seen can work against you. But there’s another reason: the stock Mac UI is designed by Apple, the best designers in the world, and do you really think you can do better? Really? The app world is full of people who think they’re better and they’re really, really, really not. Well, I still think Apple has the best collection of UI designers in the world, but, for whatever reasons, the guidance

It’s Friday, and Muse is still the #1 app in the iOS App Store — that’s a full week in the top spot. Who knows if it’s a flash in the pan or not. (Remember Clubhouse ? Sora ?) But at the moment it’s clearly a hit. It certainly helps that Meta itself is promoting Muse heavily on their own channels like Instagram and Facebook. But the Muse iOS app is sandboxed — because it has to be. So that’s the only version I’m personally tinkering with. But the Mac app is the more powerful one, because, well, it lets Muse drive your Mac. But the fact that the Muse Mac app is so powerful is why it has to be d

Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg Wednesday, after Meta’s 2026 Connect keynote (gift link): Meta Platforms Inc. unveiled a palm-sized, dedicated gadget for using Muse, the company’s popular new artificial intelligence assistant, pushing deeper into the AI devices market with a surprise announcement. The product, unveiled on stage by Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg, was born out of the company’s new design lab led by former Apple Inc. interface design chief Alan Dye and its Superintelligence AI group. [...] Dye, the former Apple design executive, and Billy Sorrentino, one of his

Jason Aten, in a good follow-up to his previous column at Inc. ( the one where he described how Muse, running on his Mac, read his Messages database) The entire reason Muse is interesting is that it isn’t just a chatbot, but can actually do things for you. But that promise also comes with a pretty high bar of responsibility. If your goal is to put a powerful AI agent on millions of devices, you have to be incredibly clear about what’s happening, and what people are agreeing to. If your primary audience does not understand what Full Disk Access means, you should not surprise them with “I’m read

Eli Tan, writing for The New York Times, “I Gave My Life Over to Meta’s A.I. Agent and Was Blown Away” (gift link): For one final task, I asked Wren for a good way to spend that $44.99 it had saved me. At this point, it knew my life pretty well. I thought it might suggest something altruistic, like donating the money to charity or buying flowers for my girlfriend, who was recovering from surgery. Instead, it suggested something even better — buying bowls from Heath Ceramics , a local ceramics maker with a dedicated following, on Facebook Marketplace, one of my favorite pastimes. Reading Tan’s

Victoria Song, in her Optimizer column/newsletter for The Verge: I’ve been aggressively avoiding Muse since it launched a few weeks ago. Sure, some of that is because I was busy testing other devices. But the number-one reason why is that I am horribly vulnerable when faced with extreme cuteness. Alas, at Meta Connect, I couldn’t escape this pink-cheeked fella with his plush ivory fur, and so I finally downloaded the app once I returned to my hotel room. He was plastered on every screen during the keynote. My eye twitched with maximum cute aggression when Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth showed us his

Great interview from Stern, as usual, seemingly conducted on the old set of Three’s Company . She opened by asking if AI is going to wipe out humanity, and I think Zuck whiffed by not simply laughing and saying no. She also directly asked his thoughts on people calling Meta Glasses “pervert glasses”. Regarding the shift from “the metaverse” to AI, Zuckerberg likened it to Apple having first worked on touchscreen tablets and then pivoting to turn the technology into the iPhone first. His point being that it’s not that iPads weren’t a big successful idea, but they’re not as big as phones. There

Meta’s annual keynote yesterday was a tight 55-minute live event held on their campus in Menlo Park. I watched the whole thing this morning, before recording tomorrow’s episode of Dithering . (Which you should subscribe to.) It was a good keynote. Consumer products announced: Third-generation Meta Glasses with cameras. A new glasses product: Ray-Ban Meta Audio . These are audio-only smart glasses, with microphones and speakers, but no camera. Zuckerberg pitched them as being less expensive, having longer battery life, and looking much more like regular glasses. All of those things are true, bu

Apple Music Hall, a state-of-the-art live music venue in London’s storied Battersea Power Station, is now open.

Dan Luu serves up some copiously documented claim chowder: After this point, most further predictions that I saw were either non-falsifiable or resolve in the future. Note that I didn’t attempt to catalogue statements that are nonsensical or were simply factually incorrect statements at the time, such as his December 2024 claim that “Generative AI’s products have effectively been trapped in amber for over a year.” January 2026 claim that “[models are] basically the same as they were a year ago. They have the same efficacy”. Zitron has not only made forward-looking statements that AI capabiliti

Apple Developer: As part of agreements with select European competition authorities, Apple is introducing changes to its App Tracking Transparency framework in the European Union. Beginning with iOS 27.2 and iPadOS 27.2, developers will have the option to use an alternative version of the App Tracking Transparency system prompt in the EU. The requirements for when you must seek permission to track users will remain the same. Due to legal requirements, only the alternative version of the system prompt is available for apps distributed in Germany, France, Italy, Poland, and Romania. In addition,

The most extraordinary Apple event in the company’s modern history was the emergency press conference on Friday, 16 July 2010 to address “antennagate” — the out-of-control media narrative that the iPhone 4 had a defective antenna design . The event was only scheduled one day in advance — I got invited around noon ET on July 15 and was on my way to the airport about an hour later. It remains one of the most interesting press events I’ve ever attended. The event was held in Apple’s Town Hall auditorium at the old Infinite Loop headquarters. Town Hall is a tiny venue but it wasn’t full. It opened

“Update My Phone & Apps: Guide” is an iOS app from developer Tair Olzhasev. By default, the only thing it does for free is give you a “Check for Updates” button that launches the system Settings app. It doesn’t even take you to the General → Software Update screen. It just takes you to the root level of Settings. Everything else it purports to do requires a $15/week subscription. That’s $780 per year. (It does offer a three-day free trial before weekly billing starts.) These other features, gated behind the “pro” subscription: Clear device status: iOS version and storage usage at a glance One-

Back in the mid-2000s there was a golden era of exuberantly designed Mac apps. Paul Kafasis coined it “ The Delicious Generation ”, a perfect name. The delicious was both a reference to Wil Shipley and Mike Matas’s Delicious Library — a personal media library management app that made something that sounds really boring look super fun — and a perfect description of the aesthetic. It clearly harks back to Steve Jobs’s description of the Aqua user interface in 2000: “One of the design goals was when you saw it, you wanted to lick it.” One of the delicious generation apps was Disco, a CD/DVD disc-

President Donald Trump, in a prepared speech before the United Nations General Assembly yesterday (one-minute video clip from Aaron Rupar, posted on Bluesky): The United States also totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control for the artificial intelligence — being spoken of so much, now — here and after officially called “super intelligence”, changing the name. The use of the word “artificial” makes intelligence fake, it makes it sound fake, and it is not fake. It’s actually amazing. But we have to be careful. In fact it is exactly the opposite of what it purports.

Bill McCool, writing at Dieline: This past Wednesday, lettering artist, designer, and author Jessica Hische took to Threads to announce that she had worked alongside Meta’s team to create the icon and logotype for their agentic AI, Muse. Acknowledging that people would be “mad because it’s AI and Meta,” Hische sought to explain at least why she had taken the gig in the first place. Obviously, she took some flak for working with Meta. While plenty of comments voiced support, just as many chastised her for even considering the project, which I can mostly sum up as a general narrative thread of “

Todd Bishop, reporting at GeekWire: Amazon says it has cut off Meta’s new Muse personal AI agent from shopping on Amazon.com on behalf of customers, after attempting unsuccessfully to get the Facebook parent company to voluntarily exclude the e-commerce site from the experience. The problem, Amazon says, is that it never agreed to any of it. Meta didn’t tell Amazon that Muse would access its store, the agent doesn’t identify itself when it browses, and it appears to capture and store customer credentials, which the company says could create privacy and security risks. As of Sunday night, peopl

Zac Hall, writing for 9to5 Mac on Friday: Meta’s new Muse AI agent app has taken the top spot on the free iPhone charts for the U.S. App Store, displacing OpenAI’s ChatGPT from the first place. Muse by Meta only launched this month , although the app has been around for a couple of weeks. This means new installs are picking up and boosting the app on the App Store’s top charts beyond the day-one launch. Just yesterday, Meta expanded Muse app availability to include the Mac. The desktop version of the app doesn’t contribute to the App Store ranking, however, as it’s downloadable from the web. F

Apple Developer: Xcode now supports a JSON-based project format (.xcproj) that’s more readable, merge-friendly, and easier for coding agents to edit. Enable it in the file inspector. Projects using .xcproj also open in earlier versions of Xcode 27. Apple released, on GitHub, a Swift library (and CLI tool) for reading, writing, and manipulating this new project format. Michael Tsai has a list of developer reactions , where are universally positive. A sampling: Simon B. Støvring : Developers have been screaming for a friendlier Xcode project format for years. I’m one of them. Tony Arnold : I’ve

Joe Rossignol, MacRumors: In May, Apple agreed to pay $250 million to settle a U.S. class action lawsuit over Siri AI’s delayed launch, and the settlement website is now live. Apple will pay an estimated $25 per eligible iPhone to eligible customers, who can submit a claim via the settlement website between September 21 and December 21 of this year. The exact payment may be higher or lower than $25 depending on the total number of valid claims submitted and other factors, with the maximum amount set at $95. Apple denies all of the allegations made in the lawsuit. Apple agreed to the settlement

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Correction: GM has confirmed it is NOT rolling phone projection to GM EVs. Instead this announcement is specific to JUST their new gas powered light-duty pickups, which have always supported Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. You know where I stand on this!

DETROIT -- Comerica Park has had several alternate identities since it became the Tigers’ home in 2000. Some have called it Comerica National Park for its spacious dimensions. Some fans simply came to call it Comerica, or abbreviated it to CoPa, as they grew comfortable with it over the years.