A dive into where Drag & Drop as a native language for macOS succeeds, and where it might be heading. kirby.pika.page/posts/drags-... I'm quite proud of this piece- I hope it reminds some fellow designers that drag gestures aren't to be limited to canvas and composition

I have put a designed product out into the world! Kind of. It's just on GitHub, which is a first for me. github.com/keren-r-bell... And for my thoughts, in this development update, I grapple with releasing something on GitHub in an imperfect state, and some more. kirby.pika.page/posts/releas...

We're excited about all of the activity around Pika's new publishing API! Look, here's an Apple Shortcut by @kerenrbell.bsky.social: www.icloud.com/shortcuts/3d...

Managed to make a working Apple Shortcut to post directly from the notes app! It works! I made it create drafts so I can fine tune before posting, but it works so well!

Incredible attention to detail in @coldbloodinc.studio 's Neverway I noticed on stream. Soooo much love and care and sprinkled on every little corner of the prologue, really excited for the full game to keep this up!

Sometimes they let me write the headlines www.theverge.com/tech/907998/...

More progress updates on my Mesh Gradient app! 🌈 I've been making very solid progress making it by hand, specifically not wanting to defer the process to an LLM. I try to capture why I choose to tackle these issues myself in this blogpost: kirby.pika.page/posts/implem...

responsive united states

You know how when Halo was in development, playtesters said spongier enemies are "smarter", despite have identical logic to their weaker versions? Siri would feel smarter if it wasn't so easy to accidentally fizzle it away after getting a one-line answer. kirby.pika.page/posts/quibbl...

So often, I see people expect technology to be complicated and frustrating, assuming that to perform a task they never tried before will be a long day of work and tinkering. Today I needed to add an audio track to a silent video. I opened the video in QuickTime. I dragged the audio file. It WORKED

Interactive rubber duck in Pool

So my little handmade web browser got the most wonderful feature on Daring Fireball over the weekend. Still hungover from the euphoria, and overwhelmed with gratitude for all the messages of encouragement from so many new users. Maybe there's still a future for user-funded handcrafted apps.

Planning out a small simple design tool, hoping to show off some good interaction design with this, thinking through all the states, enjoying being deep in the weeds with the logic. Hopefully I'll have something posted soon enough :) #SwiftUI

Really good piece by Brandon, that unlike some posts on the topic, actually remembered what the iPad is good at. Here's my thoughts on why the iPad very, very much has a place in Apple's lineup, *especially* now that its no longer the cheapest computer Apple sells. kirby.pika.page/posts/though...

a funny thing is happening in Apple Enthusiast Land, where much like people went on nomadic iPad adventures to see if “this less capable device can be My One Computer”, they’re going down similar quests with the Neo. Keep an eye on what road blocks they find this time, compare and contrast. 👀

Warning: profanity A photo in the booklet for the official 1993 Super Mario Compact Disco album contains a profane shirt in a photo that likely slipped through due to be being printed so small that it requires extreme zooming in to view the swear.

Essay so good that in the middle of it, I had no choice but to make a spreadsheet of every keyboard shortcut I remember as being "generally global" and then sit and reflect on that for 10 minutes or so

And you have to recognize, what a showing for the VP of Hardware, launching a new chassis, new design and new product branch, calling it Neo, making it low cost in all the right ways- excellent tour de force for John Turnis with the Neo

Inspired by Rene Wang's Detail.design blog, I wanna post more about good things I see in UI, and noticing Effect Ropes today was the perfect thing to kick off UX excellence-posting with. Short appreciation blogpost: kirby.pika.page/posts/detail...

Never stop naming things, Apple. absolutely uncategorizable history of products and features. Performance Core (Disambiguation) is an article that should never be conceptualized

uh oh!

New blogpost, in which I, an iPhone 16e user, remind you the true meaning of e-smas. kirby.pika.page/posts/nothin...

I think it’s silly to cover “the upgrades from 16e to 17e” as if they’re consumer facing. Apple themselves offer in-product-page comparisons up to the 12 and SE 3. But it might be interesting to speculate just how slowly will features drip down to it, what little bone makes the cut each year.

Camera Specifications wise, the iPhone Air, iPhone 16e and iPhone 17e have the same single camera- but the one with the A19 has "focus control" for portraits, and only the one with the A19 Pro can have "latest generation photographic styles". If the chip is what's allowing this, they should say so!!

Currently in Pages, Apple offers me two buttons to add an AI generated image. Image Playground ("Beta") creates a significantly worse image in under 30 seconds, and Generate Image ("Powered by OpenAI") makes an I Guess That Is Better result over about 2 minutes. What are we doing here?

It's a Beta 1, so, no sweeping statements yet. But let's say it does persist: What a sad backpedal from the good and thoughtful design reconsiderations of iOS 26 that so many overlooked. If you just keep it glassy but don't maintain your other opinions on the UI hierarchy, you just added shaders.

I don't even use Procreate, but I've watched this video several times for the beautiful closeup shots of how beautifully snappy and well designed they made their spin on Liquid Glass within a professional application. This is the bar Apple is supposed to be hitting! youtu.be/giIcSjBQcCU

On Scrolljacking, our long national nightmare. kirby.pika.page/posts/let-me...

Why aren’t we assuming a chip-like approach from Apple in AI? They used Intel chips while working on their own until they were good enough to replace them, I’d imagine they do the same with AI: Use the Google stuff while working on their own tech in the background

btw, Apple DID show the light mode version of the creative suite icons... or did they? today's quibbles are my ruminations on prerelease oddities: kirby.pika.page/posts/quibbl...

Apple Creative Suite seems scary by adding premium features to their iWork, but it seems to just be for very meh AI features. It's definitely a better deal than paying for Adobe, so I'll let Affinity and Pixelmator Pro duke it out. also MAN are these icons a mixed ass bag. poor compressor...

My thoughts and continuing ruminations on @birchtree.me 's series of posts discussing the ease of tool-making in the cursed, interesting times of LLMs. kirby.pika.page/posts/though... (My first "Response" blogpost, still working on the formatting. I should do more of these!)

Lightroom should be called Photoshop and Photoshop should be called AfterEffects and Fresco should be called Illustrator and Illustrator should be called InDesign and InDesign should be called InDesign and InDesign should be InDesign that one's fine

Is Material Design a little simple on purpose? Yes. But like, is it the purpose we think of? Or is it a secret Vibe Coding ploy? 🧐 kirby.pika.page/posts/gemini... (It's probably not... but humor me for a second.)

Wow, apparently Quiche Browser can convert long-time Android users to iOS now? I'm speechless… Messages like this are why indie development is so special 🥹

As CRTs blurred pixel art, perhaps its ok “cloud gaming” will make it so the majority way to play games will be through fuzzier views of the original assets. Perhaps that’s fine.

Just in time. I feel very strongly about this being something worth keeping an eye on. I think this is genuinely a good way to evolve the LLM chatbot format into giving users more interesting outputs. kirby.pika.page/posts/sustai... In non-boring words: This is cool shit that grandma can also use.

Good Enough are awesome. Back when I just signed up and was asked how Pika's working out for me, I told them pasting from Apple Notes was a little rough- and I was delighted to get an email just the other day telling me doing just that is greatly improved <3 ty to the team as always

Morphing transitions in [untitled]

Wait, this is the most interesting use of AI I’ve seen in months. It’s not just text and images. It’s interactive, it’s actually imaginative and weird and it still directs to its sources and keeps the open web alive. Sustainable information farming, like Google Search used to be. labs.google/disco/

In which I hope to say good riddance to Michaelsoft. kirby.pika.page/posts/do-it-...

huh ! just a big ol huh. the dramatic mind wonders about creative disagreement, a fallout post liquid glass, maybe even it being his big finale fuckoff, but reality is most likely a big paycheck and a wave goodbye. not much more than business. but huh!

Kinda late to the empty party, but, I have some interesting ideas on the value of "capacitive buttons" and more weird affordances on iPhone. kirby.pika.page/posts/the-up... tl;dr I think the most popular phone in the world doing weird gadget things is really cool and important!!!

There's no reason, right now, Not to try out Affinity and try to get used to it- at least for me as I'm just starting my degree in graphic design. Other than the time investment, I think I'll just co-apply everything I learn and try to do the same a second time in Affinity just to get used to it

Sky, the most exciting app I tried in a long time from the original creators of Shortcuts has been acquired… …by OpenAI. What a miss for Apple here. This will be so interesting to watch. www.macstories.net/news/sky-acq...

A small, pedantic appreciation post I had in mind since reading @viticci.macstories.net 's iPadOS 26 review. It's not "just" the mac windowing system! kirby.pika.page/posts/lively...

I tried Dia, Comet, and I see no reason to try Atlas now seeing its more of the same. Arc innovated and spun some cool new ideas for browsers, and the momentum is fully dead

Testing Atlas just confirms to me that I STILL don’t want to move on from Arc

my good friends and infact family members who will definitely not be replaced with my actual family in some months probably