Remember when you could reboot your computer without rebooting your phone first?

I’m not even kidding: I needed to reboot my Mac because I was unable to navigate character by character using the arrow keys when composing new iMessages in Big Sur, but Finder refused to quit during the reboot with the above error message. It was still syncing my iPhone. (Remember when we thought the iTunes rewrite would be a good thing? Good Times!) I tried quite a few things on both devices, but was unable to cancel said sync in any other way than to reboot the phone.

Feels like there is about two or three pixels where you can actually get the “resize both dimensions” cursor for a window that goes to the bottom of the screen but not cause your hidden Dock to pop out.

By the way, for the other five hidden Dock users out there: Have you tried opening the Dock while the fancy new “Now Playing” menubar item is extended? Let me know if you find out how to activate the Dock in that state!

No scrubbing forward allowed! Let us tell you about our PRODUCT instead!

Schrödinger’s 2pm meeting.

Every single one of my iCloud contacts had this “new contact photo” alert after upgrading to Big Sur, and they all said they also saw it on their end in our conversations. None of us actually had a new contact photo. Clicking the button resulted in no photo being displayed for several hours to more than a day in one case.

It’s simply insane how this is still the way Apple handles this. Why not just let the apps themselves ask for the privileges, as has been the case in forever? Now it results in shit like that. As you can see, there is nothing for me to allow there. Why? Because more than one of my super evil hacker tools needed special permissions, and after I allowed the first thing, SoundSource was shit out of luck. No matter how often I closed and reopened SoundSource, it was not able to re-trigger the magical fairy dust component that Apple needs to show me the UI piece that lets me allow a program on my computer to do what I want it to do. I had to reboot before it would show up there again. Which was great, because right afterwards you need to reboot again, so the new permissions actually work. Which was great, because for some reason in Big Sur my Bluetooth keyboard doesn’t connect to the Mac until after logging in, so rebooting is a bit of a hassle currently.

While looking for an iMessage setting regarding that earlier annoyance I saw this beautiful corona of white pixels around the rounded version of my avatar. Maybe Big Sur needs the power of an M1 GPU to properly anti-alias that border?

No really, it’s fine. I didn’t want to be able to read that text anyway!

(When you actually read the text, though: What does that mean? Do I accept some terms by clicking Continue? What are they? What happens when I don’t click it? What if I might want to click it later? Or revoke my earlier click? I couldn’t find anything about it in Settings. Is it just… information? You can click outside the dialog and use the feature without a problem, but the popup will return until you click the button.)

OK

You know, when you put an UI element that looks like a text input right next to a search… icon(?!), I will click on that “text input” and start entering my search term. Sure, you could say I’m an idiot, it is clearly labeled and I could have seen that it is not a text input and not related to the search icon.

But you could also just follow UX conventions that we have trained people to expect and understand for decades instead of giving your native apps the usability of a shitty startup grade webapp.