Notices by Steve Troughton-Smith (stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social)

Anecdotes from a Liquid Glass workshop with Apple teams & dev relations:

• Liquid Glass is not gonna be rolled back, Apple loves it, and thinks y'all are crazy
• << those who don’t adopt it now “are gonna find themselves in a tough position later.”>>
• "Xcode 27 will absolutely not have the [UIDesignRequiresCompatibility] flag, and it will not respect it if you leave it there"

The source blog reeks of LLM-speak, but I think that's just the writer's choice

https://captainswiftui.substack.com/p/talking-liquid-glass-with-apple

Here's one for the icons-in-menus haters on macOS Tahoe:

defaults write -g NSMenuEnableActionImages -bool NO

It even preserves the couple of instances you do want icons, like for window zoom/resize

/cc @gruber

I do wish App Store Connect had a checkbox somewhere to automatically scale pricing by purchasing power region to region. You can do this, manually, by remembering to set individual prices per region every time, but that's a nightmare. You hear about this from Brazilian customers all the time, especially, where App Store price tiers are perhaps 2X or more what they should be

@caseyliss Brazil really suffers from it with Apple products; the Pro Display XDR was the same price as the average annual salary. By keeping Apple's set pricing tiers, you're really aiming for the very top of the consumer market in the country

@nikitonsky there are pull-downs everywhere in iOS, and longpress context menus everywhere else 😅 Save for not using any native apps, I don't know how you could avoid them

@dmitriid @nikitonsky iOS is Apple's bigger, more-successful OS, and is also (on iPad) used with keyboard and mouse, which has had menu icons for several years. The point is where are all the calls to remove its menu icons?

It's all well and good saying now that you would have campaigned against icons in menus had they been here since the start, but nobody has brought up that claim against Apple's other OSes, and they've been here for years. I just don't believe it ex post facto

@dmitriid @nikitonsky everything you longpress on spawns a menu on iOS; for years macOS was also viewed as basically abandoned (or, as pundits said at the time, 'mature') until they started investing in it again 2019 onwards. I don't know what bearing that has on icons in menus, though, on either platform. If you're venting for the sake of venting, that's fine, but you're not going to convince me

@nikitonsky are you calling for them to be removed from iOS?

If the original Mac had used icons in menus from the start, nobody in their right mind would be calling for their removal today.

That's how you know that argument doesn't reflect reality. All major platforms now have icons in menus; you can't wind back the clock on that one, you're just obstinately refusing to follow the system standards and user expectation.

So much ink and many podcast hours have been wasted discussing the wrong parts of the issues with Liquid Glass on the Mac

A $499 MacBook Neo with the brains of a couple-year-old iPhone can run Xcode, Photoshop, Blender, Terminal, and pretty much everything else you can think of, yet your $3,200 iPad Pro, with a desktop-class chip, cannot 😑

What are we doing here?

@manualdousuario I routinely go back and reference conversations from many years ago, so that’s not a solution

If all macOS 27 adds is a cap on how much local storage Messages in iCloud is allowed to have, I would be so, so happy. This POS takes up 200GB of ever-growing dead space on my drive since nobody thought to limit it. It's a cancer

@mikecane @WarnerCrocker @doctorlaura the RAM is the only good reason. Not that it won't scream with 8GB. But 12GB would have given it more longevity

⭐️ New blog post: A Month With OpenAI's Codex

https://highcaffeinecontent.com/blog/20260301-A-Month-With-OpenAIs-Codex

It's been literal *years* since I last posted anything, so you know this is a big deal for me 😜

"I scraped 500+ one-star App Store reviews so you don't have to. Here's what actually killed their ratings"

TL;DR
1) Unwanted notifications
2) Forced account creation at launch
3) 'Slow'
N) Ads. No dark mode. Not saving logins. No timely customer support

Grain of salt required, as sourcing is flimsy, but interesting.

https://www.reddit.com/r/vibecoding/comments/1rg7sdh/i_scraped_500_onestar_app_store_reviews_so_you/

@WarnerCrocker I think the billionaires intend to replace us; consumers only.

I'm pretty convinced now that in the near future you'll be able to deploy an entire 'company in a box' of AI agents, with the equivalent to domain experts in programming, design, sound design and music, marketing, and more, that will feasibly compete with the average startup. The OpenClaw cultists^Wfans will tell you they're already doing this, today, on Mac minis. If you think this is hyperbole or kool-aid pyramid-scheme nonsense, I suspect you're not even remotely prepared for what's to come

Speaking of the quality of Apple's Private Cloud Compute model…

🫥

RE: https://swecyb.com/@anderseknert/116056950299738296

OpenClaw must be stopped 🤣

It's been a long time since Apple's pro tools group has done anything as interesting as a new, native core app like Pixelmator Pro — I think you have to go all the way back to 2004, when they introduced Motion. It is very well-realized on both Mac and iPad, and feels like the star of the Creator Studio offering. It does sting when you think Apple had to acquire the talent to make it happen, especially looking at the state of the other apps and their mixed-to-absent Liquid Glass updates