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

I think Apple made a change to UIDesignRequiresCompatibility that now reports the OS version as iOS 26, instead of iOS 19, so you might have to update all your codepaths if you were relying on that behavior.

This also tells me that Apple fully expects a lot of developers to opt-out of Liquid Glass come September, and it may no longer be 'just' a compatibility mode 😅

That playback bar though is *wild*

1) Liquid Glass is beautiful
2) Real-world content is ugly

I don't know that you can ever square that circle

This Liquid Glass flip-flopping strongly implies Apple doesn't really have any idea how to 'fix' it when faced with real-world apps and content. It might have looked gorgeous in a very controlled environment for a WWDC design session, but it's not remotely prepared for what the rest of the platform is going to throw at it

Reminders in macOS High Sierra vs Reminders in macOS Tahoe

Throwback time to the first app I ever developed — 'SmallText X'. It had some weird features shoehorned in, and it never left my hard drive, but it was a pivotal component in my introduction to Mac OS X, UI design, and learning to build real, functional software (…in REALbasic, no less)

(Screenshot of the earlier version of the project included for funsies)

Aside:

Whoa I had no memory of Carbon's color picker, which is nothing like the Mac OS X one (which we still use today, and came from NEXTSTEP)

The new Spotlight can search menu items, but it's so buried that I've been using the OS for a month and only noticed when I re-watched the WWDC keynote and saw it mentioned 😅

This could be a useful command bar if it had a dedicated tab in the new Spotlight UI

@mikecane @WarnerCrocker @doctorlaura you can do that with Shortcuts, and you can put an icon on the home screen to trigger it. That is kinda what Stage Manager is for too, but I wouldn't use that

The glass material introduced with Liquid Glass may be over the top in this seed, but it is remarkable that it can still render smoothly at 120fps on a seven year old iPad Pro even with the lensing effect

(Not reflected in video capture, of course)

#wwdc25

I know creators are going to get carried away over the summer, so I'll say this. iPadOS 26 elevates iPad into a new category of power & flexibility. It's great. But it's still an iPad — you don't get real versions of Photoshop, Blender, Xcode, Terminal, etc. Apps cannot make major use of multiwindowing any more than before. You cannot download an IDE and build apps on-device to install locally. You cannot even use virtual machines to have a real OS on tap. Temper those expectations somewhat

It looks like Apple *nailed* the API for its on-device LLM. It looks easy, powerful, and flexible. Virtually every app is going to want to add this stuff this year

"The first 12 or so years that I was writing Mac OS X apps, it was always exciting to anticipate what new features or frameworks would be announced and how I could leverage them to improve my apps. The last 12 or so years, Apple has given speeches about how much they love developers and then gone on to make changes that felt like they were meant to kill my apps, make them harder to use and harder for customers to discover, and drown us all in rising sea of bugs."
https://mastodon.social/@mjtsai/114643869152468626

‘Between iOS 18 and iOS 26, Apple was unable to ship its announced Apple Intelligence features’ hits different

Hate to break it to you, but the OS version numbers will probably stay the same in the APIs even if the marketing names change, or else everything might break in weird ways 😅 So we’ll likely still have to keep track of versioning per platform

We take it completely for granted these days, but Duolingo is kinda awesome isn’t it? There’s a reason everybody uses it. Since I’m in Brazil for a few weeks I figured I’d learn some Portuguese, and for the hell of it I checked up on the French I haven’t spoken in 20 years. Neat how it can evaluate where to put you when you drop in from nothing. I wish I had the brain space to put languages into

If anything, the last few years have taught us so much about Apple and the people who lead it. The company cannot be trusted

They've lied, they've cheated, they've bullied, strongarmed, and mislead, they've lobbied and bribed authoritarian leaders for support, they've faked 'independent reviews', they've intentionally degraded their products and their product user experience, they've broken laws and spurned lawmakers, shook down developers, and they will continue to do all of these things

If I haven't been talking about app development for a while, there's a reason for that: a very close family member has recently been diagnosed with late-stage Lewy body dementia, and things are rough and snowballing fast. We've been completely blindsided by the speed and severity. I have very little energy left over to think about Xcode, but if there are sweeping OS redesigns announced at WWDC I will do my best to handle them. Other than that, my app update schedule will be quiet for a while ✌️

@mikecane @WarnerCrocker @doctorlaura nobody wants to wear a pin, especially with the train wreck that Siri is

You know, I'm not sure the world needs a specific day where everybody lies to each other