Apple is bundling Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Motion, Compressor, and MainStage into a new subscription suite (with the obligatory vague promise of AI features) and revamping Pages, Numbers, and Keynote with more content, which I find interesting in many respects…

First off, I’ll state the obvious: this is a jab at Adobe’s Creative Cloud, which has dominated the professional creative software market for years, with the side effect that it pretty much dried up the low-end prosumer space.

By offering a comprehensive suite of “professional-grade” applications under one subscription, Apple is positioning itself as a viable alternative not just for creatives who may have been hesitant to invest in Adobe’s ecosystem, but also for those looking for more affordable options.

But… how viable is it, really? I have my doubts, especially given that I recently tried Final Cut Pro and found it lacking in several areas compared to freemium competitors like DaVinci Resolve. And I have been using Logic Pro for years. It’s a solid DAW, but it faces stiff competition from Ableton Live and an increasing number of free or low-cost alternatives. But that’s my personal experience; I wonder how this will play out for the broader market, where there’s stuff like Affinity Suite, which has recently surfaced after the Canva acquisition as a free alternative Pixelmator Pro (with paid add-ons).

Apple’s move is interesting because of its breadth and ambition–it’s great value for money for consumers, and does offer a lot of tools that can be used professionally. However, I think it also confirms one of my hunches, i.e., that (statistically) nobody was paying for the iPad app subscriptions.

And I do have to wonder how many people they have developing and maintaining all these apps–there have been many glitches and issues with Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro over the years that make me think they are not exactly top priority for Apple.

There’s a special kind of UI regression that doesn’t look like a regression until you try to use it, and the Liquid Glass Tsunami just keeps on giving.

The huge rounded corners are turning a basic motor skill into a hand-eye coordination puzzle, and this piece goes into exquisite detail on that, and demonstrates how Apple completely botched window resizing.

Spoiler: the resize hotspot is still a 19×19px target, but with the new corner radius “about 75%” of that target ends up outside the visible window. So you do what any reasonable person does and aim inside the corner (where the window actually is), and nothing happens.

The best part (in a dry, slightly tragic way) is the conclusion: the “most reliable way” to resize is to grab outside the corner, which is exactly the kind of invisible affordance that makes people feel like they’re going slightly mad.

It’s also a neat reminder that Fitts’s Law doesn’t care about your design language, and that hit-testing should follow what users perceive as the object boundary, not whatever geometry is easiest to keep from the previous release.

Oh, and that whoever did Tahoe’s UX design is borderline incompetent.

Worth reading because it’s not just a rant, it’s a small, well-illustrated teardown of how a cosmetic change can quietly break muscle memory and cause endless attrition and frustration.

The annotated images (green “expected” area, blue dot, and the “accepted target area” sitting in empty space) make the point better than any amount of hand-waving, and we need more of this to make it obvious that Apple needs to reverse course on the whole thing.

Anil Dash’s essay on how Markdown conquered everything is a good reminder that most “standards” don’t win because they’re perfect — they win because they’re good enough, easy to use, and easy to remember.

What I liked most is the through-line from early blogging (by which time I was also doing a PHP site generator that handled raw HTML posts) to today’s world, where LLMs are running stupefyingly complex workflows atop a pile of Markdown files.

It’s both empowering and a little unsettling that the same affordances that made writing on the web easier also make it easy to formalize instructions for systems that can do real damage.

I took a long detour through Textile before accepting Markdown had won (and am still paying the price for that, with thousands of Textile posts still to be converted), but the one thing I’ve found amusing over the years is that John Gruber created Markdown as a way to make writing HTML easier for humans.

One person can make a difference, and I’m willing to bet that when (ok, if) we ever become a Kardashev type 3 civilization we’ll still be using Markdown to write our interstellar missives.

Intricuit is pitching the Magic Screen as a snap-on touchscreen for MacBook Air and Pro that “comes ready with its own stylus that supports pressure sensitivity and stylus hover”, and as “the affordable alternative to bulky drawing tablets and iPads.” Which is a neat way of saying “we’re adding touch to macOS from the outside” (because Apple still won’t).

And yet, the first thing that came to my mind as I watched their videos was… How long is it going to take for Apple to “Sherlock” them?

As someone who regularly uses touchsceen laptops and very seldom use the touchscreen (the trackpad’s speed and precision is very much to blame, as well as the fiddliness of taking my hands off the keyboard to reach “up”), I have mixed feelings about this being something that I would use extensively–but I do miss the ability to dismiss dialogs and move windows like I do on Linux and Windows, and wish Apple just got on with it.

And I have a feeling they will, “soon”. In their own timescale.

This is a very well written, exquisitely detailed teardown of Apple’s decision to sprinkle tiny SF Symbols through menus in macOS Tahoe, and why it makes everything harder to scan, less consistent, and (sometimes) actively misleading.

Bruce Tognazzini (whose book I still pull out once in a while to remind myself of good UI design principles) would be proud.

Somehow I sort of tuned them out during last year’s rant about Liquid Glass, but they really do make a difference. I started actively noticing them in menus when my own little apps started sprouting some of them (apparently automatically) and thinking “why is that there?” or “what does that even mean?” and 90% of the time the icon is just not helping me at all, even in Apple’s own apps.

As a very heavy former Blackberry user, I have to say that this is pushing all the right buttons (pun intended), and I might just have to get one.

And of course there’s the obligatory high-standards Michael Fisher video announcing it in style, almost as an afterthought to their new (also pretty clever) Clicks Power Keyboard feature phone.

Their pitch is pretty direct–use the Clicks Communicator as a purpose-built device for taking action and communicating in a noisy world, etc., but what I think they are really getting right is the compact design, the audio recorder and the fingerprint reader. Oh, and it has a headphone jack.

This would make a killer corporate device for anyone who needs to be in touch but doesn’t want the distractions of a full smartphone, and I hope someone cottons on to that fact and places a huge bulk order so they get the funding to keep going.

Ryan Whitwam’s piece on switching to eSIM is a good reminder that a lot of “modernization” is really just moving failure modes around, and seems like a great way to kick off 2026 since it mirrors my own past experiences: my Truphone/iPad “side quest”, and my broader worries about eSIM-only iPhones.

A physical SIM is dumb and boring, but that’s exactly why it works: when you need to swap devices, it’s a 30‑second hardware shuffle that doesn’t depend on carrier apps, backend state, or a support queue.

With eSIM, the swap becomes a workflow—and if it fails at the wrong time you can end up locked out of your own number (and everything that still treats SMS as a magic identity token), with the delightful resolution of “go to a store and wait”.

If eSIM-only phones are the future, carriers really need an account recovery story that does not default to “we’ll text the number you currently can’t receive texts on”…

QNX (yes, that QNX) is… Back?

It’s not their legendary boot floppy, but a QEMU image with a desktop environment for QNX 8.0, with support for self-hosted compilation, using XFCE on Wayland (sadly, their Photon UI is long gone) and providing a number of development stacks and editors. The installation process seems overly contrived (and I am not doing it this holiday season, as I have far too much to play with already), so I would have loved to see an ARM bootable image for a Pi or similar.

I’m sure some enterprising souls will hack their way through this to get it to run on bare metal somehow, since QNX has always been a fascinating RTOS (even if they lost a lot of audience to embedded Linux due to their commercial approach).

If they keep tightening the bootstrapping story, this could become a surprisingly effective bridge between “I have a QNX target” and “I can ship software on it without ritual sacrifices.”

I just don’t get why Apple keeps breaking things. AirDrop used to be one of Apple’s best “it just works” features: get two devices close, pick the target, accept, done.

Adding a six-digit code step might make for a marginally stronger confirmation flow, but it also adds unnecessary friction in exactly the moments when AirDrop is most useful—quick, in-person handoffs.

It’s also the kind of interaction that breaks down fastest when there’s a language barrier, poor audio conditions, or an accessibility/disability barrier: the more you turn a fast tap into an out-loud “read me the code” dance, the less universal the feature becomes.

Somehow, someone at Apple must have thought this was a good idea. I’d love to hear the rationale, because right now it just feels like they’re hell-bent on making all of their best ecosystem features more complicated for no good reason.

This is a terrific little tool that Howard Oakley released as a Christmas gift to the Mac community.

Providable is a handy way to inspect Provenance IDs and Quarantine extended attributes (xattrs) at scale.

It can index your installed apps, crawl folders for large batches of files, or show full xattr listings for a handful of dropped files–and if you’re extra curious, it can also export results to CSV for further analysis.