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Photoshop’s ‘Modern User Interface’ Sucks (and Doesn’t Feel Modern)

Marcin Wichary at Unsung:

I’m angry. (Clearly.) We should all be angry in face of stuff like this. This is how people get fed up with software — because it feels unstable and deteriorates on its own without needing to.

I know I brought up that an existing power user base can be a huge pain in the ass, and I am a decades-old Photoshop power user. But this is different than other examples where the product needs or at least wants to evolve past its core audience or toward a different market. For Photoshop here, nothing I see indicates any change in course or clientele — and yet all of these good moments in UI that used to help me out no longer exist.

Plus, all those transgressions are solved problems. Those issues are not buried in pages of heavily litigated patents, or in seven collective brains of world-class interface designers whose driveways are presently occupied by cash-filled trucks sent over by frontier companies. This isn’t some long lost art that requires archaeologists to decipher. This feels like carelessness and laziness in face of basic UI engineering; in a likely internally-motivated effort to refresh the interface, the team threw an entire nursery worth of babies with the bathwater.

The before-and-after screenshots look like examples from a lecture on user interface design — if you swap them around make the new ones “before” and the old ones “after”. Better balance, better focus behavior, appropriate platform-native typography.

(Shades of Héliographe’s devastating critique of the history of the app icon for Pages: “If you put the Apple icons in reverse it looks like the portfolio of someone getting really really good at icon design.”)

Former Trump and Biden AI advisers Dean Ball and Ben Buchanan urge bipartisan action on AI security risks, including tighter export controls and safety audits (New York Times)

New York Times:
Former Trump and Biden AI advisers Dean Ball and Ben Buchanan urge bipartisan action on AI security risks, including tighter export controls and safety audits  —  We come from different parties and have guided artificial intelligence policy under very different presidents.

Thrawn versus the supernatural is Star Wars' best unresolved conflict

From Timothy Zahn's Heir to the Empire to Star Wars: Rebels and Ahsoka, Grand Admiral Thrawn is a signature villain whose nemesis is the Force.

7 MagicCon tips to know before attending your first Magic: The Gathering convention

I went into MagicCon: Las Vegas 2026 mostly blind. Here's everything I wish I knew beforehand.

GameStop's CEO is annoyed you don't understand how he's buying eBay

Ryan Cohen gives CNBC one of the worst interviews of the year by refusing to answer any questions, even as hosts push him to say more.