Speaking of cutting-edge pre-26-OS design innovation, have you heard of the amazing Mixed Mode in iOS 18? It allows you to set up two identical widgets from the same app (which have no user-configurable color options) and randomly one of them will use Light Mode despite your phone being set to Dark Mode. Courage™.

People complain about text over text making things unreadable in Liquid Ass – but I took this “screenshot” in Sequoia, when I got a new machine at work a few months ago. Always on the edge of innovation!

It seems like sleep mode on modern macOS is just broken. It used to be the one feature that always worked more reliable than on other platforms.

For the past years I’ve constantly had issues with my old Intel Mac Mini randomly waking up at night, causing attached hard disks to start spinning and getting very hot in the process. After switching to a M4 Mac Mini I expected my Mac to not suffer from that any more. I only installed a limited number of software after a clean install to not carry over old issues.

After the first night I already noticed that once again the brand new Mac felt quite warm, I immediately installed Sleep Aid and saw once again that it was randomly waking up for events like keepalive-push.apple.com-NonCellular or filesystem.image, then getting too hot and shutting down. This is different from the short maintenance wake-up events that the Mac does a few times per hour.

Would be slightly more convenient if the power off button on the new Minis wouldn’t be on the bottom where you always have to tilt them up to turn them on.

Last month I got a new laptop at work. When I recently wanted to airdrop myself a link from Chrome on that machine, I was confused to find the Share menu being disabled.

After a brief Kagi search I discovered the reason: Chrome had to be added into the Screen & System Audio Recording list in the Privacy & Security system settings. Of course!

Oddly this doesn’t seem to be the case with Chromium – the screenshot is from my personal laptop. I only use it as a fallback for bad websites and didn’t give it any permissions, yet the Share menu works fine. In general, it appears to affect all derivates, though – look at all these happy people being protected by this easily discoverable quirk.

If only there was some indication that this shortcut is not something I’d ever want to run at 3pm in the afternoon.

I dunno, something like it being named “Going to bed”. Or the fact that for about 90 days in a row I have exclusively and always triggered this shortcut between 11pm and 2am.
But maybe I’m just too subtle – I already dismissed this type of suggestion twice after they randomly popped up during the day… how could Siri ever learn what makes sense with such a lack of clear indicators!

Good thing the new and improved Siri with “AI” will fix all of this silliness. Any day decade now!

Ever since Steam updated their checkout UX (probably well over a year ago by now), I fall into this trap almost every time I gift someone a game. In the screenshot the design seems pretty clear: Continue with the checkout process via the big blue button on the right. Leave the checkout process and add more to the cart via the “secondary” button at the bottom.

However, the whole flow of buying a gift goes from top to bottom – before you even see the screen as shown above, you have to pick a recipient. Doing so expands the form downwards, unveiling the various options for the gift. First you enter the message, then you go down one to (optionally) add a custom signature, then you go down one for the delivery option, then you’re all set and go down once more to proceed.

Except that you don’t proceed with the button that you’re naturally drawn to. Instead you leave the process and find yourself back on the homepage of the store. Luckily they started saving the gift details you’ve entered a while ago, but initially I had to re-enter things a couple of times.

Speaking of Messages… as hard as I found that to believe myself, somehow things there got unimaginably worse about a year ago. I don’t know when or why exactly it started, but Messages has been permanently out of sync on my Mac so badly that it is barely usable anymore.

The conversation above is from July 2024.¹ Looking at the timestamps: Philipp answered 30 minutes after the hilarious meme I sent. His response arrived on my phone immediately. 18 minutes later I returned to my Mac to check out the links he sent, but no sign of the messages there. From experience I already knew that sending another message myself would get things unstuck – that’s what is shown in the video. Once it catches up, things work without any delay – until it gets stuck again as I use Messages on the phone or my work Mac.

This affects all my conversations (I only still use Messages with three holdouts that haven’t moved on from Apple), and has gotten worse over time. In the beginning it would catch up on its own after a few hours. Now it is often several days behind. Responding myself to “force a sync” as shown in the video doesn’t work instantly anymore. Sometimes it only seems to partially catch up – e.g. loading the last two of five missing messages in total. I lost any trust in Messages on the Mac showing me the full content of conversations, erasing what little remaining value that service still had to me.

Maybe I could fix it by reinstalling – logging out of iCloud and logging back in didn’t help. But frankly, I don’t care anymore. I moved on from macOS for most parts of my personal computing, and I expect to fully rid myself of it this year. Besides life being busy, that’s a main reason for the decrease in postings here. Our criticism, petty as it often may seem, usually means that we genuinely care. When you care about something, that comes with a desire for improvement and an expectation of higher standards. I stopped caring about Apple long ago – seems as good a time as any to articulate that.

I wasn’t even aware that Messages allows selecting multiple conversations until I accidentally ended up in “multi-selection” mode… with just a single conversation selected. Slightly less useful than showing the actual content of said conversation. No idea how it ended up like that, and I have not been able to get into that state intentionally since.

I wish Slack would spend half as much time on improving core functionality as they do on these obnoxious, enterprise-grade notifications for features I don’t need.

This one is particularly dumb: It’s from a Slack workspace with exactly two users – me included. All our communication there happens in channels.

Security prompt annoyances are kind of a low hanging fruit these days, but I will never understand how Apple decided that this experience after an upgrade is acceptable.