Philip Lee has an amazing new product for sale now:
Trashbot 2.0 stationery set is inspired by classic 80s computer culture, featuring unique desktop and icon designs. The set includes:
- Whiteboard x1
- Icons with magnetic back x3
- Trashbot figure/mini pen holder x1
- Error bot figure x1
- Memo Pad x2 (200pages in total)
Ordered.
Federico Viticci, writing at MacStories:
There is no doubt in my mind that the essence of iPadOS – how menus appear, lists scroll, buttons are tapped, heck, even what a pointer should look like – has been designed with more taste, thought, and care than anything in Windows 11. There is no checklist that can quantify when an interface “feels” nice. The iPadOS UI, particularly in tablet mode, feels nicer than any other tablet I’ve tried to date.
The problem is that an iPad, at least for people like me, isn’t supposed to be a companion to work that happens somewhere else. It is the work. And ultimately, I think it’s fair to demand efficiency from a machine that is supposed to make you productive. I feel this every time Stage Manager doesn’t let me place windows where I want on an external display; every time I can’t place more than four windows in a workspace; every time I can’t record podcasts like I can on a Mac; every time a website doesn’t work quite right like it does on a desktop; I feel it, over a decade into the iPad’s existence, when developers like Rogue Amoeba or Raycast can’t bring their software to iPadOS.
We can’t talk about art in software in a vacuum. As a computer maker or app developer, you have to strike that balance between the aspirational and the practical, the artistic and the functional – the kind of balance that, by and large, Apple is achieving on the Mac. Unfortunately, when it comes to iPadOS, I feel like Apple has been prioritizing the artistic aspect over the functional, and it’s not clear when that will be rectified.
Remember the 30th Anniversary Mac font from a few years ago? Robb Knight has recreated those glyphs as SVGs and they are glorious.
Earlier today, Matt Haughey published a blog post about using a custom instance of Stable Diffusion and using to create self portraits, based on work by Andy Baio and this video on YouTube.
After following the steps in Matt’s blog post, I had everything up and running, and fed the machine about 25 photos of myself. I played around with a bunch of different prompts and got some pretty wild results:
Sidestepping the very complicated subjects related to AI-art, this was a pretty fun way to spend an hour of my day. That last one is true nightmare fuel, though.
Dan Vincent, writing at his excellent Userlandia:
If you’ve been reading some parts of the internet lately, you might’ve seen a brouhaha over the quote-unquote “fact” that Pantone has “copyrighted colors.” They’re forcing Adobe to pay them oodles of money for color swatches, and Adobe said “no you.” Now users have to pay $15 a month just to use COLORS? Madame is outraged!
Well, it’s more complicated than that. The reality is that the world of color is complex, even for those of us that see and feel it every day. Many working designers don’t know all the fiendish intricacies surrounding the tools of their trade. Your real questions are “how does this affect me” and “what can I do about it?” Or maybe you’re used to picking colors from all those swatch books in Photoshop and wondered why it’s such a big deal that they went away.
In the name of expedience I’m formatting this in a question-and-answer format. Sit back, grab some popcorn, and be prepared for more than you wanted to know about the Pantone Matching System.
Last week, Adobe removed support for free Pantone colors across its Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator Creative Cloud applications. PSD files that contained Pantone spot colors now display unwanted black in their place, forcing creatives who need access to the industry-standard color books to pay for a plugin subscription (via Kotaku).
“As we had shared in June, Pantone decided to change its business model. Some of the Pantone Color Books that are pre-loaded in Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign were phased-out from future software updates in August 2022,” said Ashley Still, senior vice president of digital media marketing, strategy, and global partnerships at Adobe in a statement to The Verge. “To access the complete set of Pantone Color Books, Pantone now requires customers to purchase a premium license through Pantone Connect and install a plug-in using Adobe Exchange.”
Yes, I did link to this days after the news broke just because I thought of the headline.
Going from the new System Settings to the ancient System Information — née System Profiler — is quite jarring on macOS Ventura:
Also, can we talk about why someone centered all the text and the button that ended the up in the footer of this new settings pane?
Also, also, when is the last time any Mac had anything appear in the “Parallel SCSI” section of System Information other than the default text:
This computer doesn’t contain any Parallel SCSI devices. If you installed Parallel SCSI adapters, make sure they’re seated properly and that any devices connected are powered on, connected properly, and correctly terminated.
Speaking of Evans Hankey, she and other members of Apple’s design team chatted with GQ about the new MacBook Air. There’s not a ton of new information in the piece but this jumped out at me:
It’s a workload that she compares to “drinking from the firehouse” but even accounting for that vast portfolio of responsibilities, the Air’s redesign has been a unique challenge. “It was the first time we ever set out to do a family of products together,” she says. “We didn’t design the Air in isolation, but we designed it in tandem with the MacBook Pro.”
Mr. Macintosh on Twitter highlighted this cool set of dynamic wallpapers based on graphics from Apple’s developer website.
I’ve long been a fan of the so-called “Moon Watches,” but owning one is way, way beyond my means. Looks like Swatch is trying to change that with a new, limited-run set of watches.
I don’t have a Swatch store anywhere near me, so hopefully a Mercury or Moon edition shows up on eBay at a reasonable price at some point in the future.
I just love this piece by Jason Snell.