Reading List

The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.

Slow iOS 26 Adoption

Hartley Charlton (Slashdot): Usage data published by StatCounter (via Cult of Mac) for January 2026 indicates that only around 15 to 16% of active iPhones worldwide are running any version of iOS 26 . The breakdown shows iOS 26.1 accounting for approximately 10.6% of devices, iOS 26.2 for about 4.6%, and the original iOS 26.0 […]

Search vs. Primary Action in the iOS 26 Tab Bar

Ryan Ashcraft: Up until iOS 26, tab bars were fixed on the bottom of the screen and spanned the full horizontal space. Now, tab bars are capsule-shaped and inset from the screen edges. […] Search tabs are separated visually from the rest of the tab bar and have a circular shape. When switching to the […]

Choosing a Driving Route in CarPlay

Dr. Drang: That the default route’s Go button is gray while the alternates are green is a stupidity addressed by Sage Olson and Joe Rosensteel, so I won’t bother. What I will address is that whichever route you choose, you have to tap its Go button. Even though the full description of each route looks […]

David Rosen, RIP

Keith Stuart (tweet, Hacker News, Reddit, Wikipedia): The co-founder of Sega, who remained a director of the company until 1996, was instrumental in the birth and rise of the video game business in Japan, and in the 1980s and 90s oversaw the establishment of Sega of America and the huge success of the Mega Drive […]

Jim Moylan and the Moylan Arrow

Ben Cohen, writing last week for The Wall Street Journal (gift link):

One rainy day 40 years ago, Moylan was headed to a meeting across Ford’s campus and hopped in a company car. When he saw the fuel tank was nearly empty, he stopped at a gas pump. What happened next is something that’s happened to all of us: He realized that he’d parked on the wrong side.

Unlike the rest of us, he wasn’t infuriated. He was inspired. By the time he pulled his car around, he was already thinking about how to solve this everyday inconvenience that drives people absolutely crazy. And because the gas pump wasn’t covered by an overhead awning, he was also soaking wet. But when he got back to the office, Moylan didn’t even bother taking off his drenched coat when he started typing the first draft of a memo.

“I would like to propose a small addition,” he wrote, “in all passenger car and truck lines.” The proposal he had in mind was a symbol on the dashboard that would tell drivers which side of the car the gas tank was on. [...]

As soon as they read his memo, they began prototyping his little indicator that would be known as the Moylan Arrow. Within months, it was on the dashboard of Ford’s upcoming models. Within years, it was ripped off by the competition. Before long, it was a fixture of just about every car in the world.

What a fantastic story. I’m old enough that I remember learning to drive on cars that didn’t have the Moylan Arrow. Then I remember spotting one sometime in the 1990s, and wondering if I’d just never noticed them before. But no: this seemingly incredibly obvious design element had only recently been invented. The Journal has a copy of Moylan’s original memo, and it’s a delight to read. Clear, concise, persuasive.

“Society loves the founder who builds new companies, like Henry Ford,” Ford CEO Jim Farley told me. “I would argue that Jim Moylan is an equally compelling kind of disrupter: an engineer in a large company who insisted on making our daily lives better.”

These days, there are two types of drivers: the ones aware of the Moylan Arrow and the ones who get to find out.

Rest in peace, Jim Moylan.