This 2021 post from Jason Fried is a good chaser to his “The Big Regression” this week (which I linked to yesterday):

Much of the tension in product development and interface design comes from trying to balance the obvious, the easy, and the possible. Figuring out which things go in which bucket is critical to fully understanding how to make something useful.

Shouldn’t everything be obvious? Unless you’re making a product that just does one thing — like a paperclip, for example — everything won’t be obvious. You have to make tough calls about what needs to be obvious, what should be easy, and what should be possible. The more things something (a product, a feature, a screen, etc) does, the more calls you have to make.

This isn’t the same as prioritizing things. High, medium, low priority doesn’t tell you enough about the problem. “What needs to be obvious?” is a better question to ask than “What’s high priority?” Further, priority doesn’t tell you anything about cost. And the first thing to internalize is that everything has a cost.

Obvious / easy / possible is a good filter through which to create — and critique — designs. To borrow an example from yesterday: old-fashioned analog light switches are exemplars of obviousness; most new-fashioned smart switches are exemplars of possibility.

Juli Clover: Language learning app Duolingo has apparently been using the iPhone’s Live Activity feature to display ads on the Lock Screen and the Dynamic Island, which violates Apple’s design guidelines. According to multiple reports on Reddit, the Duolingo app has been displaying an ad for a “Super offer,” which is Duolingo’s paid subscription option. […]

Tim Hardwick (Slashdot, Hacker News): Logitech users on macOS found themselves locked out of their mouse customizations yesterday after the company let a security certificate expire, breaking both its Logi Options+ and G HUB configuration apps. Logitech devices like its MX Master series mice and MX Keys keyboards stopped working properly as a result of […]

Claudio Wunder (Hacker News): Any Engineer at @1Password here? Your Chrome Extension seems to recently started breaking HTML from certain pages. For example, the Node.js website code snippets break when 1Password Extension is enabled. Evan You: 1Password browser extension is injecting Prism.js globally on every page, which then applies its syntax highlighting logic on all […]

Howard Oakley, writing at The Eclectic Light Company

macOS Tahoe’s visual interface:

• Fits largely rectangular contents into windows with excessively rounded corners.
• Enlarges controls without any functional benefit.
• Results in app icons being more uniform, thus less distinguishable and memorable.
• Fails to distinguish tools, controls and other interface elements using differences in tone, so making them harder to use.
• Makes a mess where transparent layers are superimposed, and won’t reduce transparency when that’s needed to render its interface more accessible.

Maybe this is because I’m getting older, but that gives me the benefit of having experienced Apple’s older interfaces, with their exceptional quality and functionality.

It’s just remarkable how much better-looking MacOS was 10 years ago, compared to MacOS 26 Tahoe at its best. And it’s equally remarkable just how bad MacOS 26 Tahoe looks in many typical, non-contrived situations, where entire menus, search fields, and window titles are rendered completely illegible.