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

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...