Speaking of Quinn Nelson, he has published a video in which he took an M1 Mac mini and built it into a tiny 3D-printed case:
The result is a machine much smaller than the existing M1 Mac mini, which uses the same design that first debuted back in 2010.
I wrote about this design in 2013, hoping to see a smaller Mac mini even then. I would like to see Apple reinvent this machine, but even if they do, I don’t think it would be as radical as what Quinn ended up with.
I was no fan of Windows XP, but this documentary about its default wallpaper is fascinating.
With yesterday’s release of macOS Monterey 12.1, this little bit of the Shortcuts UI looks much nicer:
Myke Hurley has been big into mechanical keyboards for over a year now, and we finally got together to build me my first custom keyboard. I have to say, I love how it turned out:
I started with the new Keychon Q1 in Navy Blue. To that, I added a full set of NovelKeys_ Silk Red switches. I was worried about how much force the keys would take to press, but these linear switches may be too light. I just have to brush a key for it to register, so I may end up swapping in something more robust.1
The real treasure here is the keycap set. As you can see, it has a real vintage Mac feel, which is what attracted me to them. The set is the Drop + biip MT3 Extended 2048, which is somehow in stock as I write this. I’m using a mix of regular and colorful modifier keys:
When we first built this, I was using more of the colorful modifiers, but in practice, they were a bit distracting, so I’ve opted to keep everything beige except Option, Command and Return. One word of warning: if you order this keycap set, the Accent Modifier kit doesn’t include all the modifier keys, so you need the beige set as well. This left me with a lot of extra keys, but I suppose that’s the price of having something so perfect on my desk.
Around this time 30 years ago, two separate working groups were putting the finishing touches on technical standards that would come to reshape the way people observed the world. One technical standard reshaped the way that people used an important piece of office equipment at the time: the fax machine. The other would basically reshape just about everything else, becoming the de facto way that high-quality images and low-quality memes alike are shared on the internet and in professional settings. They took two divergent paths, but they came from the same place: The world of compression standards. The average person has no idea what JBIG, the compression standard most fax machines use, is—but they’ve most assuredly heard about JPEG, which was first publicly released in 1992. The JPEG format is awesome and culture-defining, but this is Tedium, and I am of course more interested in the no-name formats of the world.
Michael Flarup has launched a really cool Kickstarter campaign:
I simply love app icons — they continue to be everything that excites me about visual design. App icon design is a carefully balanced discipline with the goal of producing a memorable graphic that sits at the intersection of art and utility. At their best, app icons are design, distilled. This book is a celebration of the art and craft of app icon design and the golden age of icon design that has lived and evolved on our devices this past decade.
Backed.
The folks at Vyncher have put together an amazing dynamic wallpaper for macOS Monterey.
Yes, please. I really like how Material design looks on Android, but it’s always been out of place on iOS.
Apple’s constant reworking of Safari 15 this summer has been one of the most interesting software stories to come out of the company in a long time. It’s not very often that we see Apple rework something so thoroughly in public.
I’m a fan of the changes Apple has made to Safari 15 so far. The iPhone version was a big mess, and the “compact” tab designed that debuted on the Mac and the iPad made little sense on devices with larger screens. As the time of this writing, we’re still in the beta cycle, but I suspect the options to move the iPhone’s browser UI to the top or bottom of the screen will ship, as will the ability to go back to the compact view on the iPad and Mac. Combined with the option to show color in the tab bar, it’s hard to believe these are all the same browser:
I’m showing the Mac version of Safari 15 here, but the iPhone’s changeable UI is just as jarring. I’m also using the Mac version as an example because it’s what I use all day every day when I’m at my desk.
My personal preference is to disable the use of color in tabs, and to banish the compact view forever. This leaves my Safari looking liking this. My yet-unaddressed complaints revolve around the new tab design that I end up with after setting my preferences:
And here it is for you Dark Mode lovers:
First, there’s the ordering of the UI elements at the top of the screen:
This divorces the tab — which includes the name of the current webpage — from the webpage itself. Maybe everyone at Apple prefers their bookmarks in the Sidebar instead, but for those of us who are used to the more traditional location,1 having the Favorites Bar split the tab and its content makes skimming what tabs are where more work than it should be.
To make matters worse, it’s hard to tell at a glance which tab is active and which is inactive. Previous versions of Safari didn’t struggle with this, but Apple has seem to fit to bring the age-old “which iPad app has focus” problem to the browser. Using the Monterey beta, I almost always end up trying to tab to or away from the wrong tab because I can’t quickly register which one is active when looking at the tab bar.
That’s not to mention that they look just downright silly, especially if you’re big into wide Safari windows:
Aaaaand that’s not to mention that the button to close a tab appears under the site’s icon at just the right moment for you to accidentally close a tab you’re just meaning to click into.
Apple has made good progress in righting was a terrible wrong with the first version of Safari 15, but just because it’s basically fixed on the iPhone doesn’t mean it’s fine on the iPad or the Mac.
Francisco Tolmasky has written a fascinating Twitter thread1 about Apple’s UI frameworks and the rise of Electron all through the lens of tabbed interfaces.
This could be the best change in Monterey; the current iWork icons are a travesty:
I love how this new electric scooter looks, even if its press release is really weird.
