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

I love ease out animations as much as the next guy, but man. Whenever a website tries to add some easing or delay or control of how just scrolling through its blogposts works, it drives me up a wall

My early "hands-off" impressions of the possibly massively important glasses by Meta. I think we're seeing the first step in a very very exciting journey. kirby.pika.page/posts/the-me...

Back to using Quiche, it felt just a bit too flat before and the simple material switch really does it for me. It’s so good and so fun and fast to tweak, can’t praise it enough

Indie apps starting to update to OS 26 :)) now is the question of whether and when bigger apps will actually adopt it, or start an aping of it with their brand’s signatures. My guess is detached tab bars and toolbars, but not as drastic and bubbly as Apple wants.

Apple having its designers with accents do design voiceovers is a very intentional choice here

And there it is. The beginning of the end. The Browser Company didn't even manage to get through the closed beta of Dia before they started pulling plugs from Arc. Deeply disappointing.

As we head towards the release of the OS 26's, I have to come to terms with the fact that app icons by Apple just aren't going to look good for a whole lot of years for now. If you ignored the captions under these icons, what is “Triangle made of three sticks”? kirby.pika.page/posts/the-ic...

There’s a mistake at the core of Apple’s new Liquid Glass hierarchy. Join me in trying to fix one of their recent "core design principle" disasters on macOS 26 Tahoe: kirby.pika.page/posts/quibbl...

glad to be right. all the new details and refinements to liquid glass an definitely the improved and livelier animations make me confident that even if some ideas are flawed, the execution is still very much there

Clearly, there’s systems to ensure white text is always legible over either colorful or bright backgrounds. There’s ways to make this work

I love our stupid website

Day by day, Figma drops another feature that makes me more confident I'll never need to open Illustrator again. Figma Draw is evolving at an insane pace

See, this is embarrassing, unless its gone in the final release. You have UI experts that should tell you how to design a horizontal selection bar. This is not the first time this problem was tackled. Your own design is confusing you. There is a right answer to this

Join me in a horrible adventure in the bowels of Figma to balance Liquid Glass's ups and downs! kirby.pika.page/posts/pov-yo... Particularly happy with how this one came out.

I like it. More liquid, more bouncy. Hoping we see a lot more soulful bits like this as the betas take their final forms

if i once considered being the type of person who uses en and em dashes correctly, LLM overuse has now made me always choose a regular dash as a statement of selfness

Thoughts on macOS 26 and it's very big, very cool buttons. kirby.pika.page/posts/a-time...

amusing oversights ahoy

You look at the liquid glass visual and its pleasing and nice and you want it applied on things, But isolated from that, the goal of “you should be able to see things through the buttons that control those things, melding the button labels with the content” is just not a desired thing

The more liquid glass I see, the sadder I get that I think it just, doesn’t achieve its goal. You don’t really see much of the content behind it, and when you do, you can’t see what’s in front. I think the Liquid part is great! but the glass part is doomed to be reduced to the tiniest of flourishes

Pika keeps getting better, really excited to try this, should help me feel better about posting more topical, fleeting thoughts

Figured the noise about apple “chickening out of liquid glass” was just noise, as there’s still plenty of adjusting until September. I’m happy to see the charm back, but I can feel it is more refined than beta 2. Good.

Let’s touch glass

And yes, the new iOS and iPadOS 26 UI Kit is now available

Sad about how toned down the liquid glass warbling and morphing effects are on Beta 3. They were really special. I think a middle point between this and the previous beta can be reached to maintain the vibrant exciting moments it used to allow, because right now, a lot of charm feels removed.

blows my mind that Apple uses this as an example of good communication on when an AI wont do something because of user input

In which we examine the problem in Image Playground besides the images it generates- I think Apple has strict guardrails, I think its good they exist, and I think they do a very poor job of communicating them, and generally giving users control over image creation. kirby.pika.page/posts/quibbl...

liquid glass… sure shows more of Content. there it is. todays day, showing through the sidebar, and i could notice it. i guess this is a good thing! good job, liquid glass

This is inconsistent, right? I'm not crazy? What dictates the logic of: Thin/1-column apps = Bottom-to-top stack Wide/2+ column apps = Sidebar now hovers over everything I knew it looked "off" on Mac and its because it really does confuse the hierarchy

I have my doubts on the practical future of this "Content" that Apple wants developers to "finally bring to the foreground" by obscuring it with their beautiful Liquid Glass. Spoiler- I'm hopeful, but a lot remains to be seen once the design actually ships. kirby.pika.page/posts/liquid...

Last week, I sat down with Craig Federighi for 30 minutes to talk about the iPad. We covered a lot: the iPad's multitasking journey, being inspired by macOS, iPad criticisms over the years and…the essence of the iPad in 2025. I'm proud of this one. My story: www.macstories.net/stories/inte...

Seems image analysis is just a private cloud compute thing, makes sense

New post analyzing Apple's new Design Hierarchy I've been noticing across the iOS 26 beta! I think it has some insights on priority and reachability kirby.pika.page/posts/apples...

this doesnt matter at all but i did notice it. they forgot to update to the iOS 26 wallpaper on this demo device when showing off call screening. weird omission

i’m seeing search button at the bottom of a lot more apps. i really agree with a hierarchy, reachability-wise (thumb to top) of search-categories-faves

This WWDC feels like the "We added all the Google features" show

I CALLED IT! #wwdc25

Mark my probably very wrong WWDC words. kirby.pika.page/posts/hyper-... This post will feel SO dated in 32 hours lmao

i have the most specific guesses for wwdc, they dont really make sense for a bingo. i cant equally give “macOS name leak” the same square as my vision for the siri app. i should make the most dated blog post ever

got access to Figma Make, early protip: periodically just ask it to refactor itself into more files so it can finish editing stuff faster, then go to the bathroom for a minute or four. it rewriting entire long files every single time is such a hassle

oh i was experimenting with a notes app in swiftUI just a while ago, the idea indeed died when i hit the richtext wall. good! except something like my app will probably be a new tutorial, so i wont feel all that special lol

oh this looks good. and this being the shortcuts guys makes me believe it actually works. please actually work