After living with Apple’s 27.0 OSs since launch, I have some more annoyances to get off my chest. This time, it’s all about how tabs and menus have gotten worse. I’ve already ranted about the Liquid Glass material in general, but these two design changes in particular have really been grinding my gears. I’ll reiterate that Apple’s latest OSs look substantially nicer to me than the previous set… but that only makes these setbacks more glaring. Also, many of these issues aren’t nearly as bad in light mode — but I use dark mode exclusively on all platforms. Apple offers this appearance setting, so I think it’s fair to criticize them when it’s not holding up. First up, let’s talk tab bars. I think these looked awful in the original Liquid Glass redesign, and in 27.0 they look even worse. Below is an example of three tab bars from Safari in macOS. All of them are in dark mode. The top example is from macOS 26 with the “clear” Liquid Glass setting, the middle is macOS 27 with the default (mid-slider) version of Liquid Glass, and the bottom is macOS 27 with Liquid Glass at its most tinted. In each, the middle tab is selected (though I think the word “tab” is being quite generous to these globs). In macOS 26, there was practically no difference between the clear and tinted versions of tabs. Similarly, the clearest and default/middle tabs in macOS 27 are effectively the same. Because of this, I’m leaving out the redundant examples. Even though I still think it’s ugly, I vastly prefer the macOS 26 version of these three options. It offers the most contrast, and it makes more sense in dark mode: the background is darker and the foreground of the active tab is lighter. The middle example is what tabs look like in the default (mid-slider) version of Liquid Glass in macOS 27. There’s now only a very faint outline around the active tab, and practically no difference in background colours. To me, this is unreasonably subtle. The effect is even worse when there are a lot of tabs open. Lastly, there’s macOS 27 with the fully tinted Liquid Glass setting. It’s better, but it still looks less correct to me than the tab design from macOS 26. It’s difficult to put into words how much I loathe the look of this new tab bar design. I don’t mind the more “bubbly” look of Liquid Glass throughout the 27 OSs for the most part. It gives UI elements more dimension than in the 26 OSs. But it doesn’t work for tabs. Because the bubbly look is inside a trough, the active tab’s glass effect ends up looking like a blur on the top and bottom. This reduces contrast further and makes the active tab harder for me to pick out. Even in dark mode with full tint, I find the active tab less visually clear than in 26’s clear mode. Now, I’m sure there are at least a few people reading who don’t see what the fuss is about. If that’s you, I assure you that the difference is more stark when you’re not comparing things side by side. It’s not impossible for me to pick out the active tab, but I think it’s trickier than it needs to be! But, if you still don’t believe me, here’s a little experiment. Which of these do you think is most legible? The text/background colours in the above image are based on the foreground/background colours used in the tab bar instances above. First is clear in macOS 26, then the default from macOS 27, then fully tinted in macOS 27. I think they’re all pretty awful, but I prefer the macOS 26 clear version. Again, this is because I’m using dark mode. In dark mode, light text appears on a darker background. Similarly, active UI elements have a lighter background than their surrounding elements. I’m sure there are counter-examples, but this is how just about everything else works in Apple’s own apps! It should be noted that Safari uses the system default tab bar design. I also see this design in Apple’s Terminal app, in Pixelmator Pro, and elsewhere. I don’t use Xcode daily anymore, but you’ll also find them there — though in true Xcode fashion, they’re ever so slightly nonstandard and also don’t respect your tint setting. Below is a screenshot of Xcode using my current settings of dark mode with fully tinted Liquid Glass. Up next: menus. Below is an image showing four versions of the same menu in macOS. Top left is macOS 26 clear, top right is macOS 26 tinted, bottom left is macOS 27 default (mid-slider), and bottom right is macOS 27 fully tinted. It’s a similar story here. In macOS 26’s dark mode, I had no problem with system menus even when Liquid Glass was set to clear. In macOS 27, even in the fully tinted mode, the menus have much lower contrast. They also now lose all of Liquid Glass’s refractive effects when at their most tinted. I think this is less of an issue than the tab design changes, but it’s still a downgrade. Again, I’m certain many people don’t care about this. Some might wonder why I’m not turning on accessibility settings to help with these things, if they bother me so much. I’ve flirted with this (especially the “Increase Contrast” setting), but those settings have many knock-on effects. 1 But honestly, I don’t think accessibility settings should be required to have a reasonable amount of contrast in a design system. Maybe Apple disagrees, but I really hope more dark mode tweaks are coming. The “Increase Contrast” setting is under System Settings -> Accessibility -> Display -> Increase Contrast. Interestingly, you can use this setting along with the clearest version of Liquid Glass to almost get back to how things looked in macOS 26’s version of tinted. However, it adds contrast-y lines around many UI elements that I find extremely distracting. It also alters colours on some elements to, strangely, make them less contrast-y. It feels unevenly applied and poorly implemented in several apps. ↩

It’s an empirical question!

Trump wants to add a citizenship question and ban questions on race

I recently watched the talk by Scott Jenson titled "Are we really going to use the same Desktop UX forever?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7AfAcQwLW0&t=445s. He's a great presenter, really articulate and concise. The kind of speaker that you'd

My mail, WhatsApp and Signal now live in one app I built myself. I called it Contact. It is not a chat app and not an AI app, it sits somewhere in between. When I tried to draw what it is in my notebook, a factory came out. This post explains that drawing, starting with a puzzle. A puzzle for the class At Jurre's school the day starts with a "binnenkomer", a small opening activity, and every child takes a turn. The message that it was his turn next came in through the WhatsApp group of his class. So one evening Jurre sat down and made his own: nine dots, and a rule. "Je moet elk stipje in een eigen vakje hebben, maar je mag maar twee vierkanten tekenen." Every dot in its own box, but you may only draw two squares. Jurre's puzzle: the rule on top, nine dots, and one of the solutions He wanted copies, a clean one for everybody. I took a photo, which lands in my own photo library at home within seconds. In Contact I opened a session and typed what I wanted: take the latest photo, make a printable page with the text and the empty puzzle, without the solution, and print it. One page first. The agent did not know where the printer was. It scanned the network, found a Canon that was asleep, told me so, and waited until I switched it on. Along the way it found the original message from the class group in Contact's own WhatsApp archive, so it knew what the page was for. The session in Contact: the agent looks for the printer, I tell it what to make Printing, on a printer that nobody had set up for this The first page came out faded, one cartridge was nearly empty. The agent found a print mode that still gave deep black, and then the copies came out. Within the hour there was a stack on the table: the empty square, the nine dots, the rule in a proper font. The next morning Jurre took them to his class. The result: the puzzle without the solution, ready to hand out in class That small evening has everything in it. Someone has an idea. It comes in, somebody decides it matters, a machine with enough context and energy turns it into a thing, and the thing goes back to the people. That is the factory. The drawing The drawing from my notebook: people, ideas, triage, the machine with its chimney, and the long arrow back On the left: people. They have ideas, and those come in every shape: a mail, a WhatsApp, a voice message, a screenshot, a sketch on a sheet of paper. Then triage, the funnel. Not everything needs me, and not everything needs me now. Contact reads everything that comes in on the machine in the homelab: my own hardware, boring Debian, offline. It sorts what needs me from what can wait, and groups messages into conversations per person or per topic, whatever app they came from. Fewer apps, less fiddling, but more context and more control. Contact on the laptop, here with sample data: what needs me, drafts, and a conversation with a draft reply waiting Then the machine itself: creation plus context. A session is an agent working on one thing, started from a conversation with one tap. What makes it good is not the model, it is the context it gets. My notes and rules. Every log line of all my apps and computers, well over a million signals a day. The photo library. Customer files and documented source code. The conversation it came from. The machine knows where it stands before it starts. On top sits the chimney: energy, in tokens, compute and memory. This is the part that is new. Context used to be a pile of documents. With enough energy it becomes fluid, you can shape it. Ask it, rewrite it, turn it into a page, a prototype or a print. The chimney, measured: tokens per model I will be honest about the chimney. Some weeks we burn millions of tokens on a single feature, and I do not always know if it was worth it. Let the record show that I spare no cost or effort to chase software feel. But a factory with a chimney and no meter is something to keep an eye on. Out of the machine come artifacts: a draft reply, a preview page, a prototype, a printed puzzle, a website, a game. Nora wanted a game too. She drew a rainbow and told me about a unicorn on a skateboard collecting colours in a fluffy world of clouds, and that became the game. Same factory, different input. Nora's input for her game: a rainbow, clouds and colours to collect Nora playing the game that came out of her drawing Another product of the same factory: the music app, native on iOS and on Android And then the long arrow at the bottom: feedback. Ideas, artifacts and products go back to the people. A draft reply goes back to the customer, after I read it and approve it on my phone; Contact never sends anything by itself. The puzzle went back to the class. What people say about it comes in again on the left, and the loop closes. Not a chat app, not an AI app There are apps for people: Teams, Slack, WhatsApp. There are apps for AI. Contact is neither. It sits between them, on them and in them, at the crossing of people and machine. It is made for making things, and for learning while you do. When it works I hardly notice it: a message comes in, a session picks it up, a draft is waiting when I look. It runs as a native app on the iPhone, the Vision Pro and the laptop, all sharing one idea of what a conversation and a session are. On the Vision Pro the sessions float next to each other, a very nice way to watch several streams of work at once. On the iPhone it is with me all day. A few weeks ago I wrote about making my own Android; that taught me how far you get without touching the operating system, if you own the data, the screens and the concept. Contact is what came out of that lesson. The hardest word When making is cheap and fast, the difficult part is saying no. At one point I asked for my lock screen to show the state of the factory: what waits for me, which session has a question. It was built, I tested it on my phone in the evening, and it worked. I looked at it and decided it was not useful to me. Back to plain notifications, the same evening, nothing left behind. The lock screen experiment: built, tested, and switched off again the same evening My personal reflection helps here. Writing in the notebook makes my norms visible: privacy, the feel of software, and the rule "das Beste oder nichts". That rule leads to "no" quite often. A not-doing choice is a real choice, and now that almost anything can be made, it may be the most important one. Conclusion Contact is a small factory. People and their ideas go in, triage decides what matters, a machine with context and energy makes something, and it goes back to the people. The trick is not the model, it is the context. And the courage to throw away what you made when it is not good enough. So if your inbox feels like a pile of messages, maybe it is a pile of ideas waiting for a factory.