Numeric Citizen Blog

The upcoming CMS feature in Realmac Software Elements is sooooo cool, flexible and powerful. Even RSS feeds are supported! You can see that in action in their latest Dev Diary video.

One simple thing that is missing from iPadOS 26: CMD-Q to quit an application. Other things that need work: the CMD-TAB switcher is not glassified and lacks contrats with the background view. Same comment goes for the Spotlight search field which can be really hard to see. Oh and here’s the thing: if you happen to work both on the Mac and an iPad: you kind expect that both platforms behave the same way. As an example, I want Spotlight on iPad to be the same as on the Mac by offering the four search modes.

On iPadOS 26, you can resize the Settings windows as you like. I wish we could do the same on the Mac!

Well, using iPadOS 26 beta3, it seems that I can’t use my iPad in «clamshell» mode while hooked to an external display… really?

Currently starting my week-end long experiment with an 2024 M4 iPad Pro running iPadOS 26 with an external display. This feels so different and yet familiar to the… Mac? The iPad? I’m not sure, just yet. Expect more posts in the coming days.

I often repeat this thought in my head when I’m in challenging times: “everything around me has been done by people not smarter than me.”. It’s inspired by Steve Jobs’ words from an interview he did in the early 1990s, where he was reflecting on how empowering it is to realize that the world is built by people just like us — and that we can reshape it too.

Here’s a thought: I would like to ask people of all ages, specifically those between 16 and 70, how they feel about Apple Liquid Glass. Do younger individuals prefer the original version, while older ones favor the toned-down version? I suspect this might be the case.

Next weekend when going to the chalet, I’ll bring my iPad, Magic Keyboard and my LG UltraFine 4K monitor so that I can experiment with iPadOS 26 with an external monitor. The last time I tried this was with iPadOS 18 with Stage Manager. It didn’t work well. Can’t wait to see the difference.

I see encouraging signs with today’s releases of “whateverOS beta3”¹. But there is still much work to be done as shown in exhibit #9.

Maybe Apple could provide a Low, Medium and High settings for Liquid Glass and most people would probably be happy with it.

It’s one of those Monday that will take a hard time to get started. 😅 I had such a great weekend. Let’s get this done.

With the addition of the traffic lights buttons on iPadOS 26, it’s now easier to spot which window is active because inactive windows has their traffic light buttons grayed with three little dots as seen on this screenshot.

Cloudflare Is Blocking AI Crawlers by Default

Last year, internet infrastructure firm Cloudflare launched tools enabling its customers to block AI scrapers. Today the company has taken its fight against permissionless scraping several steps further. It has switched to blocking AI crawlers by default for its customers and is moving forward with a Pay Per Crawl program that lets customers charge AI companies to scrape their websites.

I paid a visit to my Cloudflare dashboard and I saw the option to turn on the blocking of AI bots. I’m just not sure that I want to silence myself from LLM training. What if everyone does the same?

Do you think that a few years from now, Liquid Glass will age well? Was this even a consideration by Apple’s designers when they put that up together?

I want to like Apple’s vision of their newest OS incarnations, but I find it hard at this point. I’m hoping that beta3 will change and help improve some of my feelings.

I wonder what’s going on with Daniel Eran Dilger. It’s been close to five years without posting on his blog: Roughly Drafted. His Twitter account is now private. Nothing to see on LinkedIn either. 🧐

My view tonight. 😍

I realize that I should use Inoreader’s ability to generate a RSS feed from a folder and subscribe to this feed in Reeder instead of subscribing to individual feeds in Reeder. This would make Inoreader the source of truth. I’ll work on that this weekend.

It appears that not only Liquid Glass breaks readability in many cases, but information density too is affected, something that I care even more. What comes after the iPhone 15 Pro Max to support this new UI paradigm? 🤦🏻‍♂️

This is the new readability standards from Apple, a trillion dollars tech company. Here’s a screenshot of two Finder windows. Which one is active? Why is the tab of the inactive window darker than the active one? Why can I barely distinguish the tab of the active window? And those “floating over the content” controls in the top portion, are just, weird and out of this place.

For the first time in twenty years, I don’t have any business-related apps on my mobile phone, except one for 2FA. No email, no instant messaging, no documents, nothing! I feel some sort of hard-to-describe relief.

Journal on macOS Tahoe feels unfinished, barely a proof of concept to me. Who’s designing this at Apple? It feels it was put together the day before WWDC. Too many things to list here. Next betas can’t come soon enough, and I’m really curious to see how much improvements we’re going to see from beta2 to beta 3 and beyond.

Matt Birchler in Liquid glass one month later

If I could sum it up briefly, I’d say that liquid glass is highly dependent on the content it’s covering to determine how delightful it is as a UI. That’s a real challenge to overcome and it’s a big reason why we tend to see these highly-transparent interface designs get more and more opaque in time. The highs are very high in my book, but there are still plenty of “yikes” moments that I wish weren’t there and I hope get improved by the fall.

This makes me think that iOS 26 is really the new iOS 7 moment in Apple history. I also agree with Matt’s critique and observations. I don’t think that a UI is good when you have to meet a certain context in order to make it look good. A great UI is good most if not all the time.

I’m not sure why and what Americans will celebrate tomorrow.

I’ve Got Better Things To Do Than This, and Yet

At the point when you have to blur the content area to make the UI stand out from it, how can you possibly argue that it gets out of the way? It makes no sense.

He puts words on something I couldn’t name myself.