The other night, I was having a couple drinks with some friends who came over to visit. I had only three drinks in the course of an evening, but I guess I was pretty tipsy — apparently your tolerance drops off a cliff in the early days of fatherhood — and I might have ranted a bit about Microsoft (and other things) on Mastodon:

While I’m drinking (in company), does anybody else think about the ribbon UI in Office and how it is a travesty of UI design? Just the worst ideas [sic] ever, and they’ve kept them for decades.

Look, when Apple f’s up, you’re stuck with it for 5 years or so. When Microsoft messes up, contraptions [editor’s note: I don’t even know what I meant here, but it’s definitely an autocorrect error that I didn’t notice at the time], live with it, it must be supported in enterprise until the cockroaches die.

The friggin ribbon bar thing sucks. Kill it already. It’s a usability disaster.

My daughter is 8 weeks old and she’ll grow up with the ribbon.

Going to pretend that Microsoft’s business tanked after Windows 95, and yes, it is very weird they never made a sequel.

My internet friend Declan Chidlow took umbrage with my slightly drunken rant and wrote a rebuttal sharing that the ribbon is good, actually. (I’ll just add that I’m very disappointed that the coolest people I know all live thousands of kilometres away.)

I disagree strongly with Declan, but I want to credit his writing and how thoughtfully he argues his point:

The grouping of related items together in labelled sections helps with association and understanding of function, even when just an icon is shown. The ribbon also at least displays some textual labels, which is nice for usability over everything being an icon.

Being a bit taller, the ribbon also has room to significantly flatten the hierarchy by exposing items users had to go digging for in the menu bar, so feature discoverability is much improved. Contextual tabs that only appear while performing an action that necessitates them also reduce the clutter of appearing toolbars.

He has many more additional points, but I want to do him the credit of encouraging you to read his thoughts in full, rather than reading my abridged version. He also has a number of screenshots of different versions of the ribbon which aid him in sharing his point.

Once you’re done reading that, let me share why the ribbon is a complete travesty.

Since Declan is sharing screenshots, I figure I better share a few of my own. 

When I think about Word, I tend to think about the versions I wrote a lot of school papers in. I was using Windows until high school, so my memories of Word span from Word 95 to around Word 2007 (which is around the time I stopped using Windows and got a Mac).

Declan shared a number of screenshots of just the ribbon, but I think it’s better to show the ribbon in context of the full window. The following screenshots are all sourced from Version Museum’s history of Word (this site is an invaluable resource, holy smokes).

I spent a lot of time as a young child using Word 95 on our Windows 95 machine at the house. (I wrote books in it! When I was eight, I wrote a 600-page fantasy novel. I don’t think it was very good.) Here’s the UI, pre-ribbon:

I will not pretend this is some bastion of glorious design, but at the time, this felt pretty remarkable. The GUI was easy to use, Windows 95 supported real multitasking, and Microsoft was smart enough to ​“borrow” a lot of good ideas from classic Mac OS (or System 5, at the time, since Apple didn’t call it Mac OS until 1996).

Granted, I was four when Windows 95 came out and six when I started using it, so I didn’t have all that context.

As an adult though, it’s obvious to the naked eye. This UI is half baked, and worse than anything Apple would ship under Steve Jobs’ supervision, but I’ll give it a pass for its time. (I don’t love what I call double-decker navigation. More on that later, but this is the early days of the GUI, and everybody was figuring this stuff out in real time, so let’s not rush to judgement just yet.)

A few quick notes, since I can’t resist:

1. There are two separate window controls, stacked on top of each other (see the top right), and that is inexcusably confusing.
2. There are two navigation layers of icons/​buttons, and then above a Mac-style menu control. The menu-control was always excellent (I remember using it!), but two layers of proportionally different controls below was confusing.
3. If you include the menu bar and the page margins, it looks like the control area is about four rows tall, which is a lot of vertical space. This has always been the problem with Microsoft’s Office UI.

I also spent a lot of time with Word 2002, which looks like this:

(Word 2000 looks quite similar, but not quite as nice, and my family never got Word 2000, so I have less experience with it.) 

I think this is a nice improvement. The controls are all in one row, so to speak. Icons are grouped together nicely — bold, italics, and underline controls are right beside font selection, and the new document, save, paste, and undo buttons are all grouped, which makes some sort of sense.

I think Word 2002 is probably peak Word design. I don’t think it gets better than that. The only Word UI that looks better, I think, is Word 1.0 for Mac (in 1985):

Obviously, display and rendering technology had advanced well beyond Word 1.0 by 1995, but this version of Word was ahead of its time and looked fantastic. The simple controls mean that it’s obvious where to go if you want to make changes (the menu bar). Today, an entire cottage industry of Mac text editors (like iA Writer, Ulysses, and Byword) all imitate this minimalist aesthetic.

Word 2003 would carry along the tradition of Word 2002, but with more style and less taste (the blue is a lot and I’m certain it influenced the colours people used in their documents during this period, because blue doesn’t look good with everything).

So let’s say that Word 2002’s design is better. But this isn’t awful. I wrote more than half of my high school essays in Word 2003. It’s nice to see some colour in our user interfaces, so long as that colour is used to differentiate either the app, window, or actions. In the case of Windows, it was just blue. Blue everywhere!

There have been worse sins.

Speaking of, it’s time to talk about the ribbon. The ribbon UI debuted in 2007. Declan has great screenshots. Here’s his screenshot of the ribbon UI. From top to bottom: 2007 on Windows 7, 2010 on Windows 7, 2013 on Windows 10, and Microsoft 365 on Windows 11.

I think it’s important to share the context of the ribbon in the context of the window, so here it is in 2010 (the cleanest screenshot I could find of a non-beta version):

On a widescreen display, vertical space is at a premium. (This is the primary reason I’m a left-dock Mac user on my laptop). This is especially true on Windows, where most displays are 16:9 instead of the taller 16:10 aspect ratio used by Macs.

The ribbon is far too large, eliminating a lot of space that should be used for working on your document.

The UI is also exceptionally strange, and I don’t think it’s user friendly. I think that the more adept the average person becomes at interacting with Office, the less adept they are at navigating the rest of their machine, because the UI is so alien compared to the rest of the operating system.

Declan says the following about the ribbon:

Being a bit taller, the ribbon also has room to significantly flatten the hierarchy by exposing items users had to go digging for in the menu bar, so feature discoverability is much improved. Contextual tabs that only appear while performing an action that necessitates them also reduce the clutter of appearing toolbars.

I disagree with this so strongly. The hierarchy has not been flattened. It’s been rearranged. Clicking Insert doesn’t reveal a menu; it completely changes your navigation. Home has nothing to do with a home; it’s really for text editing. 

So clicking Insert, Page Layout, Mailings, Review, View — that all changes the UI out from under you. I think it messes with your sense of place and space the same way that the ever-changing UI in Adobe’s creative suite makes it difficult to learn. 

But the two rows of buttons is, I think, the greater sin. Particularly over time, as Microsoft removed borders to clearly indicate the boundaries of these buttons. Their groupings largely don’t make sense — bullet points are above left alignment, and text alignment is nowhere near font size like it used to be, for example. 

And some of the buttons are two rows high, indicating their prominence. These buttons are used for Style previews, but they only display six style previews at a time.

I’m not a Word connoisseur (ick), but if you know people who use Word, you know there are two kinds of people:

1. The people who don’t use Styles.
2. The people who use Styles religiously, and have far more than five in a document. (These are the same people who make the presentations that line up perfectly with corporate branding, so I appreciate them as a designer.)

These two groups do not understand one another, and the UI serves neither of them. Styles get in the way of and confuse the first group (“why did my text formatting just change?”), and the people in the second group are frustrated they can only see a few at a time.

Right around this time was when people began to get very frustrated with Word. John Gruber invented Markdown just a few years later. There was a palpable sense that you would buy a Mac if you wanted a good word processing program (Pages), or you might use LibreOffice if you wanted a sane alternative for Windows (I knew many people and corporate environments who were doing this by 2010).

There was this feeling that Word had become too bloated. Nerds complained about the actual bloat in the file sizes, but normal people felt the program itself had become bloated and harder to use. I think the new features in 2007 and beyond were actually fairly narrow, but their arrangement in the ribbon meant that the UI encroached on your work, thus creating a feeling that it was harder to get things done and the program was more bloated than before.

(If this sounds familiar, Apple is experiencing similar complaints with Liquid Glass. If somebody says iOS just feels bloated or harder to use, they are reacting to the same problem — UI interfering with content — but they understandably lack the design vocabulary to voice their concerns with clarity.)

You can see that Microsoft struggled with the information hierarchy in Office 2013.

Note the ALL-CAPS TAB HEADINGS in the screenshot. My experience designing software is that, if you resort to all-caps in your UI, your hierarchy is messed up and you’re struggling to communicate how to use your app. (All-caps is useful in marketing, but not in UI.)

You’ll also note that, as of 2010, FILE came before HOME in the navigation. (What is Home if it’s not the first tab? So strange.)

And if you were to click Review, you would see the deck chairs rearrange and the UI slip out from under you.

There aren’t a lot of screenshots of ribbon menus outside of the Home tab, which is arguably its best conceived tab. The Review menu is a bit of an abomination. Each grouping has its label below the other labels, instead of above. (They can’t be above the others, because the main menu bar is already above the others, so there’s another hierarchy problem.) 

Some of the labels are two lines long, some are one line long. While it’s nice that there are labels, this is unsightly. There’s a three-line menu item for Tracking, which is entirely inscrutable to me.

The labels, the shifting UI, and the hierarchical issues all exist so that these labels and icons can be as large as possible. Clearly somebody at Microsoft thought people couldn’t use computers because the previous layouts, which required you to hover over each icon for a tooltip, were inscrutable. So they went to tremendous lengths to make the labels visible all the time.

But despite all those efforts, the UI is still unknowable and inscrutable. So we have gained nothing, and lost a good deal of the clarity that might exist if the toolbar just followed normal system conventions.

I am not the world’s best designer by any stretch of the imagination, but I feel comfortable saying I would not design this.

The Mac version of Word didn’t get the ribbon bar until 2011. In 2008, while Windows users were adjusting to the new ribbon UI, Word for Mac was much more elegant:

I don’t know about you, but if I need to prepare a document, I can tell you which of these UIs I would vastly prefer. 

This version of Word follows OS X’s general design philosophy. When you look at it, it almost feels inevitable: how else would this be designed? But we have seen how else it could be designed: it could have a ribbon bar.

In 2006, I got my first Mac. I think it was this Core Duo model, in white plastic. (It was before the plastic unibody design, which came a couple years later.) So while I used Word throughout the rest of high school, I didn’t get the ribbon bar on my Mac until 2011. In 2011, I was already using Pages for schoolwork, and Markdown for all my professional writing, so I was happy to let the ribbon pass me by.

Unfortunately, the ribbon bar can’t be viewed in isolation.

In my opinion, the ribbon bar reflects Microsoft’s carelessness. It’s one thing to have bad taste; it’s another to be careless. The visual presentation and organization of the ribbon bar is careless, and it exists so Microsoft can avoid solving the hard problems that come with good interface design.

Millions upon millions of people use Microsoft’s products every day. When the tools you use are carelessly made, and they are the tools your organization wants you to use, the organization conveys the level of expected care and polish for their work too.

If you were a contractor, and you used crummy tools, you would do crummy work. If you worked in an office, and the tools you were asked to use for email, word processing, and presentations were crummy, I believe that would affect your work too.

We talk a lot about how you don’t need great tools to do great work. But the tools we use influence the quality of work we do, and the better the tool, the more likely the work will be good too. This is why so many of us care about the design regressions of Liquid Glass: they will have untold effects on a generation of new designers who have never learned the fundamentals.

UI design isn’t like other areas of graphic design, like illustration, poster design, or other marketing applications. It is testable and knowable. A great amount of care went into prior Mac UIs, and a lot of user testing was done to make the classic Mac and early OS X as good as they were.

I am not aware of Microsoft doing similar work, because they are careless. I believe that attitude has made millions of other people careless. (In Windows 11, the Start Menu includes ads. On my Xbox Series X, half my home screen is filled with ads for Game Pass. At one point, I saw a McDonald’s ad in there. Microsoft wants to show you ads between boss fights. Obviously, this is all in poor taste, but it’s all so careless. Nobody hates their end users more than Microsoft.)

To the degree that the world is getting worse, is it partly because of the billionaires. But it is also because carelessness and apathy have made much of our work redundant and easily replaced with automation. This has affected what we make, how we value each other and our collective humanity, and how we vote and live out our civilian lives in society. 

To blame all of society’s woes on the ribbon bar is obviously dramatic, and I’m not trying to suggest causation. But be aware that the tools you make and use will either better humanity or worsen it. A lack of care in our tools reflects a lack of care for one another.

Nothing is neutral.

For one year, I wrote in my design portfolio’s blog almost every week. The first 40 weeks or so, I wrote updates on the work and shared a little bit of stuff that caught my eye around the web (example). The next dozen weeks, I tired to share some insights into design strategy that I’ve learned over time (example).

Simultaneously, I ran an email newsletter, and shared each post to LinkedIn. 

After running these experiments for a year, it brings me a small of amount of shame to report that it has been entirely fruitless. I have nine email subscribers. One is me. One is my wife. Six are friends of mine that I know personally. That’s eight total. So what that really means is that this work has produced one subscriber.

Additionally, it has resulted in no work from LinkedIn. No leads. No ​“connections” (gross). Etc.

I don’t mean to sound like a crybaby. That’s not the point. But this didn’t work, and it’s time to go back to the drawing board.

I have two blogs — this one and my portfolio. But I run a one-man design studio, so I’ve never been sure how to differentiate content between these two sites. Common sense says that I ought to post everything on the portfolio, and let my true self shines through, but that feels gross to me — I think because the portfolio isn’t a personal site. It’s a business site. And perhaps that distinction is silly, but it feels important. I don’t think I want this post to appear on my portfolio, for example.

It feels to me like this is the site where I figure things out, and the portfolio is for what things look like when they’re done. But I don’t know how that plays into a blogging strategy.

It’s possible that the portfolio blog should be exclusively focused on the work. Blog posts are minor work, case studies are major work, etc. That’s meritorious, but it feels too corporate for my liking. 

It’s also possible the portfolio doesn’t need a blog at all. But blogging has merit: my client found me through my personal site, and didn’t care what was in my portfolio. (His opening line in our first meeting was ​“I read your review of the new MacBook Pros and really liked it.”)

I’ve always been a fan of Austin Kleon’s Show Your Work, and have to admit that I’m disappointed the behind-the-scenes approach didn’t bear much fruit. If it works, it attracts a lot of designers, but sharing what you know is a great way to learn yourself, and it’s also a great way to demonstrate bits and pieces of the work along the way. Those posts can then form the foundation of case studies later.

I’m not attempting to become a famous blogger, but it would be nice to build some traction with this work. The great thing about toiling in obscurity is that your mistakes aren’t as visible. The difficult thing about toiling in obscurity is a lack of feedback. For all I know, the BTS stuff was great, but nobody saw it. Tree in the woods and all that.

My point with all this is that I’ve been thinking about this for over a year and don’t have any answers. If you have thoughts on this, I would love to hear them. 

Sometimes we are so close to our own problems we can’t see the solutions right in front of our face.

The brilliant designer Louie Mantia, writing about a dearth of good design amidst third-party App Store apps, but expressing a sentiment that I think is true about the internet as well:

… software engineers have taken over more of the responsibility of designing apps. That would be great if that meant the overall design of apps has improved, but I think we can see that it has not.

…

Apps should be beautiful. They should be much more beautiful than they are now. Don’t you think so? Years ago, when I worked at Apple, my official role was Visual Designer. Think about that for a minute. I think about it a lot. My job was primarily to make things look good. I would get a wireframe from a UI designer and turn that into something that users want to look at and interact with. (It was a cool job.)

…

Virtually every app is owned and directed by an engineer. (Before you jump in, I know there are exceptions. And I know some are marketing or business-driven.) But designers generally don’t own or direct the apps they work on. At best, they’re still ranked below the engineer who owns the product. It’s been this way for nearly 15 – 20 years. Before that, I think there were a lot more designer-and-engineer partnerships.

…

I don’t know how you feel, but so far the collective output from this experiment has me convinced that this approach is neither financially viable nor a mechanism for making good products. It’s just a lot of people pumping out apps that — generally speaking — no one but them wants to use, because the entire direction of each of these vibe-coded apps only ever seem to satisfy one person, the person who ​“made” it.

The entire post is excellent and well worth your time. I’ve been thinking about it a lot since I read it, and I think he’s right: my experience working with startups and larger firms is that engineers rule the roost, generally. They dictate everything from the frameworks to the UI kits they want to use, and sometimes your job is to assemble a whole from somebody else’s junk bin.

But the rise of LLM-enabled programming has dramatically reduced the UX role. Engineers don’t think they need a designer anymore, because speed is a more important metric for capitalism than usability, which is harder to measure and reaps fewer immediate rewards. 

Earlier this year, I fired a client when they asked me to start designing everything in Claude Code and other similar AI-based design tools. They were hoping designs would be made faster, and that the code would come almost pre-ready after I was done designing.

My mantra was that Claude is about 7x slower than I am (or was; I don’t know if it’s gotten faster), and the output is much worse. I don’t mean to imply that Claude’s output was ​“not bad.” It was awful. At one point while I was trialling it, I asked it to design a new feature for a music venue, and it designed a dating app. When I asked what I did to make it misinterpret my instructions, it told me it executed my instructions perfectly. I am not making this up!

Despite all this, the client told me they wanted me to use AI tools instead, and that they hoped my role would shift to PM.

So I fired them from my client list. 

I was grateful I was in a position to take the financial hit. I felt my business couldn’t succeed, long-term, if I was doing this sort of work.

But in that position, it was obvious that many of these startups and firms don’t care about design. They care about whatever’s hot. For years, the Cool Thing To Do was have a great designer on your team, even if you stonewalled them at every step of the way, because then you could say you were doing the Cool Thing.

Now, the Cool Thing is making everything with AI. And since these companies don’t need to pretend they care about design anymore, their true colours are much more obvious.

An earlier draft of my initial thoughts on the iPhone Duo included a long note describing my curiosity about how Safari would feel and work on the Duo. It was growing too esoteric and wordy, and I wasn’t in the headspace to edit it for clarity, so I just deleted it.

Thankfully, my earlier questions — which were mostly about env(safe-area-inset) — are slowly getting answered. Mike Piontek writes about his disappointment in Safari on the iPhone Duo, and the situation looks pretty bleak. As in, this is the worst possible outcome.

Like Mike, if Apple insists that our designs should influence the browser chrome, I would like to control the browser chrome. I’d love to see his suggestions get adopted sooner rather than later, and they have solved this problem before with safe area insets.

You know that XKCD comic about dependency? Turns out to be true: learn about the people holding up the internet. I didn’t know that one volunteer maintains bash, four volunteers maintain SQLite, and one volunteer maintains the time zone database. (A little googling to learn more also turned up that one person maintains gpsd, which all GPS devices seemingly rely on. As always, our most critical infrastructure is seemingly built on the most fragile ecosystems.)

This is cool: a screensaver that displays fresh images from sites like BP&O, Siteinspire, Fonts In Use, Dieline, Illustration LOL, designboom, Colossal, and more. Use the default set of websites or add your own. Free of charge.

It’s that time of year again: Stack Overflow has published the results from their 2026 Developer Survey. I think the design is particularly excellent this year, and the wealth of the data that’s available is fantastic.

Web development is a part of my job, but I consider it a secondary or tertiary element (designer > web developer, basically). So it’s always interesting to see what’s happening outside of my little bubble. 

This year’s questions were so focussed on AI that it was obvious Stack Overflow is going through something. Obviously the whole industry is changing rapidly thanks to LLMs, but Stack Overflow has clearly taken the hit. The questions mostly felt like they were trying to figure out what happened to them in real time.

File this under TIL: Chromium has a new Declarative Partial Updates feature, which uses a new <?marker> element, ​“which enables out-of-order streaming of content.”

So you could use this feature to recursively load content on a page after it loads without using Javascript. (I think.)

Dave Rupert has an explainer, but in short: 🤯

It’s going to take me ten years to understand the implications here (are these HTML imports I really want HTML imports it’s such an obvious feature how come we don’t have it I will abuse this feature to get it if I have to). Really cool stuff.

I’ve been working on collecting my own thoughts about AI into an essay for a few weeks now, but I have to admit that Pentagram designer Giorgia Lupi already captured much of what I was going to say in this article for the New York Times. (On one hand: Darn it. On the other hand, darn it all, I’m still going to write the essay if only because I need to for myself.)

Lupi’s article is a beautifully illustrated and cogently written essay on the creative process, which she elegantly argues AI can’t duplicate. The link should get you access, even if you don’t have a subscription to the Times.

Lupi says:

Human experience is complex and particular. Creative work means contemplating and translating that complexity rather than flattening it into the simplest answer. This is true whether you are making a data visualization, a brand or a story. The impulse to optimize for the obvious and to stop at the simplest answer is what I believe we have to resist.

And later, after documenting what AI is useful for and what her team won’t use it for:

A.I. may be (mostly) accurate, but it’s not considerate. The greatest contributions to humanity — art, inventions, even products — show evidence of people who got lost in a problem and came out the other side with an idea they would not have found otherwise. That does not happen by taking a shortcut to the center. It happens in the detours. 

As is often the case with the Times, this article is filled with great animations and illustrations. My favourite below:

Via Kottke.

For something like a year, there have been rumours going around about the new touch-based OLED MacBook Pros. 

The rumour that had me most skeptical was one about being thinner and lighter than previous generations.

I really want lighter MacBook Pros. Anything we can do to maintain their power envelope while making them smaller is a big win. My 16″ MacBook Pro is a tank, while 5lb isn’t enormously heavy, it definitely adds up in a bag. (From my recent experiences, I can tell you it adds up more when you’re carrying a laptop bag, a car seat, and a 13lb 6‑week-old baby too).

I was an early adopter of the disastrously thin and light MacBook Pros with the world’s worst keyboards. I went through a bunch of those as a sort-of unpaid QA tester for the world’s largest company. It was not great. Eventually, I gave up and bought an iMac Pro instead, because getting work done was more important than being portable.

The current MacBook Pro generation is a wonderful design and was a great course correction. Making them smaller and lighter again sounds like a terrible idea.

So I’ve been nervously waiting for more information about that with baited breath.

From the same Bloomberg article about Ternus taking charge of design at Apple (which I also wrote about) comes this juicy new tidbit about new laptop designs:

The new MacBook Pros are lighter — significantly lighter. Apple has reengineered the machine’s interior, miniaturizing parts and rearranging components to make the computer much easier to carry. The current 16-inch MacBook Pro weighs as much as 4.8 pounds, compared with 3.3 pounds for the 15-inch MacBook Air, so any meaningful reduction would be immediately noticeable. I expect these machines, currently in testing with macOS 27.2, to arrive by next month.

I will not be a guinea pig for this design. I’m not buying one in 2026. (Maybe 2027 with a new studio budget, but we’ll have to see.) 

However, this sounds like good news! Making a laptop thinner and lighter without making dramatic changes to the rest of the machine is a terrible idea. Making a laptop thinner and lighter because your chips are all smaller now at 2nm and you’ve miniaturized and rearranged the other components? That sounds like it could work. 

I’m hopeful that this machine doesn’t throttle, burn my legs, or ship with a stupid busted garbage keyboard made by imps from hell. But I’ll let other people test it.

My current laptop is an M4 Max and still has lots of life in it. A few things I would consider upgrading for:

1. If the touchscreen lets me work in something like Concepts on my Mac (where I do all my early exploration for work), that would be incredible.
2. If the laptop were lighter while maintaining or exceeding current sustained performance, and maintaining or improving current battery life, that’s a must.
3. Cellular. Please. Please add cellular. My home network is so fast (3.5gb/s symmetric) that leaving the house and using somebody else’s network is painful. And on top of that, the networks at my favourite coffee shops and libraries just don’t work reliably at all, leaving me to hotspot to my phone. And when I hotspot to my phone, I run into bizarre issues with Docker, DDEV, AWS, and Imgix while working on local development. Having cellular built into the laptop would resolve a lot of pain points for me.
4. If they, at the very least, keep the ports we have. HDMI takes up a lot of space, but I end up using it in conference rooms all the time. You know what’s annoying? Bringing the USB‑C to HDMI dongle. I’ve lost a lot of those.
5. 128gb of RAM. I bought 64gb on this machine a year and a half ago to save a couple hundred bucks. In the face of current RAM pricing, it’s important that I share this publicly: that was stupid. I should have bit the darn bullet; I could always use more RAM. (Currently I have 24GB in swap, and it’s a Sunday afternoon; I’m not even working.)

The nano-texture screen is so great on my current laptop, and the mini LED design works so well for me, that I’m not even sure OLED would make a difference in my workflow. While I’m a big fan of OLED and have the biggest OLED TV I could buy in my home theatre, I don’t need it on a laptop.

But there are other things I would like to have. I am very much looking forward to the October event.

From Bloomberg: Apple’s John Ternus Has Found a New Design Chief: Himself:

[The design arrangement] changed when Williams retired last year. Although Cook announced in a press release that the design teams would report directly to him after Williams’ departure — and that was true on paper — they actually began answering to Ternus. Cook gave him responsibility for design as part of the eventual transition to CEO. During the CEO transition period between April and September, Apple’s design leaders were effectively Ternus’ only direct reports before Cook stepped down.

Ternus already had some involvement with the design studio as Apple’s head of hardware engineering, given the close coordination required between the two functions. Since becoming CEO, however, he has immersed himself in the industrial design and human interface teams. Several people familiar with the department say he works hands-on in the studio several times a week, sometimes visiting multiple times in a single day.

Steve Jobs, of course, was known for taking a similarly direct approach to design while working with Ive. But Ternus’ involvement marks a major shift from the Cook era. Designers say Cook typically visited the studio for about an hour once a month, at most.

… With Ternus making design a major priority and taking such an active role in the department, it appears he has already chosen Apple’s new design leader and ultimate decision maker: himself.

Compared to Tim Cook, Ternus’ involvement is refreshing. Colour me intrigued. Cook was never much of a product guy, and there were times when the products suffered for it.

The comparison to Steve Jobs makes my eyes roll into the back of my head a little bit. We need to stop comparing every tech CEO to Steve. Only Steve could be Steve.

One thing that Steve had was taste, and he had it in spades. It remains to be seen if Ternus has taste. It sounds like he took over in July last year, presumably when the new Liquid Glass designs were already wrapped. So I’m encouraged to see Liquid Glass get a little better this year. All their changes have pushed it a little closer to the Aqua designs of yore, and it’s a massive improvement over all.

I also think Ternus is a good speaker and a smart (and shrewd) guy, and it comes across like he knows his stuff. In a couple interviews with Tom’s Guide and TechRadar, Ternus speaks clearly and intelligently about his team’s products.

But clearly Ternus is stuck between a rock and a hard place. He was a known Mac Pro apologist at one point. He understands the Mac. If he doesn’t like Liquid Glass on the Mac, I wouldn’t be surprised.

But as CEO, he as conflicting priorities:

1. Apple’s pride and hubris forbids it from admitting mistakes and rolling back a design. So we need to wait until the next full redesign in a few years to see if Ternus has the goods.
2. Ternus might be a product guy, but he’s also a corporate CEO, and he knows the iPhone is where the juice is. What’s good for iPhone is good for Mac, from that perspective, so maybe Liquid Glass stays, even if it makes the platform a little worse.
3. Money, money, money is the top priority for a CEO.

So fixing designs that old-school (read: old) people in the community don’t like is probably pretty low down his priority list.

All that to say, I don’t know what to think about this. It’s either very good news or very bad news, but it’s hard to imagine that a CEO spending hours a week guiding the designers is a neutral event with no consequences whatsover.

We’ll have to wait and see.

After her WordPress site was consecutively hacked and scraped by bots, Winnie Lim writes about how running a personal website is not fun anymore:

It takes spiritual energy to create, maintain and produce personal projects. At the core, these projects exists because there is a belief in some sense of shared humanity. I write because I believe someone out there resonates with my experiences. But when everything starts to be about speed, utility and power, life becomes a dehumanising experience. Why should I take the time and effort — the deep meditative state I need to reach to translate my inner experiences into coherent words — when AI bots just scrape everything? And someone out there is probably typing a prompt and getting responses in 0.001 seconds without giving a single thought about the human energy that is powering that response.

I get it.

What a beautiful way to describe the act of creating something for other people. Making something for others requires a belief in our shared humanity. I love that.

I don’t know if I agree that running a personal website isn’t fun anymore. I’d simply say: never bet against the blog.

To me, having your own website and blogging feels more vital than ever. A good personal website — one that doesn’t look and read like slop — is a differentiator now. In that sense alone, having a little website for yourself feels important.

But the real strong feeling I have probably stems from a youth spent playing in a metal band and hanging out in the hardcore and punk scenes a lot: screw the man, man. I don’t lose a lot of sleep over bots scraping my site. You can’t fight what’s coming (RIP Cormac McCarthy). Yet I look around and I see a lot of old-timers leaving the scene. Just the other day I saw a thread of developers on Mastodon talking about how they were changing careers entirely; some were becoming nurses, some were getting into the trades, and some were making plans to get out while the going is good.

Similarly, a lot of people have stopped blogging. My RSS feed is drier than ever. (I guess I’m implying that my RSS feed was wet at one point? Sounds gross. But you know what I mean).

I don’t think humans want to see less cool stuff than before. This is a generational sea change.

I grew up in a mob-run town (it was very safe for that reason; don’t poop where you eat and all that). 

One of the things I learned about the mob is that they have a purge every decade or two to get rid of the bad blood. It’s The Godfather, basically. Assassinations, hits, all that stuff. 

I learned the general pattern for recognizing mob warfare, so when my wife and I later lived in Toronto and there was a shooting at the same restaurant down the street from our condo twice in one week, I could say with 100% certainty that this was a good old-fashioned mafia purge.

It feels like the same thing is happening on the internet with a generation of designers and developers. They’re all really smart people, but they either feel too young, too old, or too risk-averse to deal with the industry changing anymore.

I’m not trying to imply that’s who Winnie is and what she’s thinking. I don’t know her. But I have seen this sentiment expressed many times in the past twelve months.

My point is this: if your peers all leave a scene, you can view that as a warning, or you can recognize that you have the entire market to yourself.

So it goes with blogging: if you have the stomach to scream into the void, this is a vital time to share your thoughts freely on the internet.

I think a lot of it has to do with motivation. If you write for other people, and it feels like those people have disappeared, why bother continuing? 

But I write for me. I write to figure things out. I write to practice critical thinking and I share because I’m a nerd. I’m under no illusions of my own importance. Publishing is the exercise that takes this from a vanity journal to a creative practice — something that involves showing up and putting in the time to make something, even when it’s hard, even when nobody is listening, even when bots are the core audience. Because who cares? Bots won’t always be the core audience, nobody is listening until one day when a lot of people are listening, and it gets easier the more often you do it.

All that to say pull your pirate flag out of storage, be a rebel, screw the man, and blog like your life depended on it. I think it’s more vital than ever.

A couple years ago, somebody recommended Carl Pullein’s YouTube channel on the Mac Power Users forum.

This really messed me up.

The video that caught my eye was called ​“Stop Using Your Task Manager as a Project Manager,” and it sort of blew my mind. I have been a devout Omnifocus user for fifteen years or so, with brief flirtations with Things and Todoist, and have always stored my tasks there.

Carl’s thesis is that Omnifocus, Things, Todoist, whatever — these are not project managers. The tasks might be linked to projects, but you’re not dealing with the project in those apps. You’re working with the tasks. Carl’s problem is that, when you check off a task in those apps, they disappear from view. And if it’s going to be a project manager, you need a bird’s eye view of things.

This has sent me down a years-long rabbit hole. While Carl espouses Gantt charts, I hate them. I’m sure they’re useful, but I have a job, you know? Carl also espouses spreadsheets, but my friends, I am allergic to spreadsheets. Extremely allergic.

I am a designer by trade. I might sound superficial, but if I’m going to use a tool, it’s got to be aesthetically pleasing. Gantt charts and spreadsheets are not going to cut it.

So I’ve tried Asana, ClickUp, Notion, and several others that I genuinely don’t remember anymore because the dalliances were always brief. Asana got kicked out for being too expensive for a single person. ClickUp is a disaster; it’s so broken that should be punishable by law.

And Notion is… well, it’s Notion. Do you like proselytizing the software you use and spending all your time click-click-clicking around instead of getting something done? Notion is for you. Do you like software that looks like junk, but is extremely customizable? Notion is for you. 

I have spent years on this, and still don’t have a great project management solution. At this point, given the way that LLMs are doing, I’m considering writing everything in Markdown docs (I love Markdown and have used plain text for all my notes since 2010).

I have a few needs:

1. First, I am a single individual. Sometimes, I need to share tasks. For example, my wife is on maternity leave for the next eleven months, and she wants to help with my business’s finances. (She never really sees the money going in or out of the business, I think she’s always wanted to, and it takes two hours a month — so she has the time.) I need to share my monthly project with her so she knows what receipts she needs to grab. So sharing needs to be possible.
2. I take a lot of meeting notes.
3. I write a lot of notes while working on a project, and trying to reason something out.
4. I also collect all the files clients send me.

Outside of tasks, everything else is basically a simple file, or a collection of files. So I think what I’m going to do going forward is pretty simple:

1. I need to use a task manager that supports sharing projects. In my case, since the only person I really need to share tasks with is my spouse, I could use Things or Omnifocus and give her my login credentials. Then let sync just deal with the rest. (Otherwise, the ​“best” option for my tastes might be something like Todoist.)
2. Each client should get one meeting note. For the past two or three years, each meeting note has been its own log in Notion. I have never reviewed those files, or at least very rarely. Clients often have multiple projects, but those projects might weave together (like a book design and an accompanying website, for example). I’ve been using databases to connect everything in Notion, but this seems like tremendous overkill for one person. It’s so much slower than just typing in plain text on my Mac.
3. For the notes while I’m working on a project, I should make each note a date-based plain-text note and stick it in a project. Maybe I should just make this one file too, which H2s for different dates? Some of these notes run pretty long; much like this post, I ramble about things that would be of interest to only me.
4. Those files that clients send me already go into the appropriate project directories in my Mac, in a subdirectory called 01 Assets (numbered so I can sort them in the Finder alphanumerically).

This would mean that everything that touches a file is a file inside a file system, and todo lists are the only things that aren’t done in plain text. If a project ever needs a top-level file describing it, that’s a non-issue in this system too.

I think this would cover it. A standard project directory would look like this:

Client Name:
- Client Name Meeting Notes.txt
- Project Name
	01 Assets
	02 Editable Files
	03 Review 
	04 Delivery
	Project Name.txt
	Project Name Notes.txt (or a subfolder)

Then tasks can live wherever they need to live.

If you’re reading this and you have any other options you might recommend for something like this, let me know! I’ve never worked in a team in an office setting (always freelanced and ran a studio), and this is one of my blind spots.

Austin Kleon blogs about social media in The Bad Place:

Pretty much all social media is The Bad Place, but some social media thinks it’s The Good Place, and that somehow makes it even worse.

For example: Bluesky (literally blue sky, a.k.a. the heavens) thinks of itself as The Good Place, an alternative to The Bad Place (a.k.a Twitter/​X). But it’s still a place where people torture each other — mostly by preaching to the choir and/​or boring each other into submission. It’s not, IMO, what I’d call fun. (At least in the microdoses I’ve experienced. As with all social media, the dosage is the poison.)

Meanwhile, whenever I pop into The Bad Place, it’s like everybody has accepted it’s The Bad Place and has carried on. Despite its toxic chaos, it’s still sort of… well, I won’t say fun, but it’s not boring.

I love this way of thinking about social media. Twitter, Reddit (the current dopamine addiction I cannot shake), Facebook — all of them are the bad place.

I’ve been thinking about using Ochi to keep myself off of these places.

I have two thoughts on the iPhone Duo.

First, I think the iPhone Duo is going to be a hit.

Second, It’s not for me. But I kind of want one anyway, partially out of curiosity and partially for work.

My prediction

As far as my prediction goes: I don’t think the Duo is going to be the best-selling iPhone this year. (I don’t think Apple could produce enough of them to make that happen, even if they wanted to.) But I do think it’s going to sell like hotcakes. I think they’re going to sell as many as they can make, and I think every folding phone will look like this within the next twelve months.

I’m 35 years old, and my friends, my parents and in-laws, and my friends’ parents are all talking about this phone. All of them are expressing skepticism: ​“Who on earth would want a folding phone? Why do you need that?”

I am well aware that anything invented after you’re 30 is basically from the devil and unnecessary, so I’m cognizant that this derision from the older generation likely indicates a hit.

A few other times I’ve heard similar sentiments in my lifetime from the same age range:

• “This iPad thing. What a stupid name. And it’s just a big phone. What’s the point?”
• “A phone without a keyboard is just dumb. Nobody wants this.”
• “So you’re telling me people send text messages to the internet and it just posts on this Twitter thing. It’s 104 characters or something. What a joke. Nobody wants that.” (This remains my personal favourite; my father said it after he heard about Twitter on the radio one day circa 2007.)

As far as I’m concerned, ​“Who wants a folding phone?” has claim chowder written all over it.

In addition, I was at the Apple Store on Sunday for an unrelated errand and asked one of the employees if people seemed excited about the Duo, and he told me at least 50% of the people coming by were asking if they could see one. So yeah, people seem very interested.

My own thoughts

As for me, I think the form factor is smart, and the design team has clearly knocked it out of the park. I think people are going to love the matte display outdoors (I would love a nano texture option for my iPhone Pro). And I think people just love their iPhones, and given the option, always want a bigger iPhone.

I’ve been keeping a list of how often the bigger iPhone would have been handy since it was announced. My wife and I just celebrated the arrival of our firstborn. She’s six weeks old now. Until just a couple days ago, she wouldn’t sleep without being held, and I’m already a bit of a night owl, so I took the night shift. A larger single-handed device would have made this much better for me, as you can imagine.

But I don’t think the form factor is for me. To tell you the truth, I want a smaller phone, not a bigger one. My iPhone 17 Pro is already too wide for me. I don’t think my hands are particularly small or particularly large. They’re normal-sized hands for a male. And phones are getting too large for me to use with one hand, which is a problem.

I’d love the Mini form factor with the Pro camera system.

However, at some point, I think I’m going to test the Duo in an Apple Store. Depending how it feels to use, I might end up with one. Maybe not this year, and not as my primary phone. But if this thing takes off, it’ll be important to understand the form factor and how it feels for web browsing and apps. 

Safari on a Duo looks really weird.