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

Apple did say they made the OS a whole lot faster. What they didn't say is they made it a whole lot less buggy. It's still the same mess Liquid Glass left it in last release. The UI frameworks are still in a right state 🤪

@mikecane @WarnerCrocker @doctorlaura can you just wait till Monday? Nobody knows.

(Obviously iPads and Macs exist, so it's not only gonna work with the Dynamic Island)

@mikecane @WarnerCrocker @doctorlaura because Apple sells iPads and Macs

I don't even think Microsoft knows what it's making anymore. What do you mean a 'digital badge' with a screen, camera, unspecified operating system, and 'agent support'. Who wants this, and who wants any of this from Microsoft of all people? 😅

The hoops they have to jump through to do things everybody else does on their phones because Microsoft shitcanned their mobile OS and forfeited their place in the smartphone market

RE: https://mastodon.social/@stroughtonsmith/114658018646351487

It's been a year and I'm still not sure what a 'good Liquid Glass app' looks like. Everything stalled at 'good enough'

@mikecane @WarnerCrocker @doctorlaura I'm amused you think the prices will ever go back down. That's just the new normal. It goes only up

@mikecane @WarnerCrocker @doctorlaura is AI writing your posts now? 🤢

I wouldn't be surprised if AI tools like Mythos make the permissive security architecture of platforms like macOS untenable

Microsoft is in a really tough spot right now, under assault and losing ground on all fronts. The only thing keeping them going is inertia, but there are generations growing up without Microsoft products in their lives and there's going to come a tipping point where the floor falls out from under them. I think we're already seeing this with Xbox, but it wouldn't surprise me if Windows is next. Giving up on mobile left them without an ecosystem, and their developer story right now is in tatters

The idea that we can rewind the clock to when developers cared enough to make high-quality unique iPad apps like Push Pop Press did is a complete fantasy. If you push the reset button on iPad today, developers aren't remotely in the mood to rebuild the kind of unique, bespoke app ecosystem the device had before iOS 7 and the last big reset. If iPad were invented today, it would have a fate much more similar to Vision Pro than anybody wants to think about

https://mjtsai.com/blog/2026/05/04/macbook-neo-and-how-the-ipad-could-be/

@mikecane @WarnerCrocker @doctorlaura there is a 0% chance of Siri Pin this WWDC. All of the Siri products rely on a Siri that doesn't exist yet, and won't until (hopefully) September. That is, if it's not delayed again. I don't expect a Siri Pin for years, if they ever ship it. You're probably getting AirPods with cameras this year. You /might/ get glasses

Tragic.

https://www.macrumors.com/2026/04/16/apple-was-filming-aircraft-crash-for-vision-pro/

The story around the decline in software quality around macOS is the same as it's been for years: Apple doesn't have the bandwidth to maintain two copies of every app, one for macOS and one for iOS, and keep feature parity. That's why they embarked down the road of Mac Catalyst and SwiftUI. The two paths out of this rut are either invest heavily in hiring and training up dwindling desktop/AppKit engineers, or align with the iOS versions and just have one codebase built with UIKit and/or SwiftUI

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