Ilyabirman

When Apple announced iOS 26 last summer, they said you would finally be able to manually choose which microphone to use. I was thrilled: I could permanently choose the iPhone's own microphone. The problem was that whenever I connected AirPods, the iPhone

In John Gruber's Talk Show #453 with Louie Mantia , the familiar point comes up again: Liquid Glass is particularly bad on the Mac, where it is least well thought through. On the iPhone, it is at least somewhat tolerable. If Apple devoted as many resource

When you hear that some app was "vibe coded", how much quality do you expect? As recently as last year, vibe coding seemed like nothing more than a toy to me. Sure, it was cool that you could tell a computer to build something and it would sort of build i

At the beginning of the recent ATP episode, Marco Arment talked about the Episode Limit feature in Overcast (the discussion starts at around 7:50). For any podcast, you can set how many episodes to keep downloaded on the device. Say you set the limit to t

There is a principle in user interface design that I call "Let me click". I'll give you three examples. A group of checkboxes with one required A tip from 2018 features an example where the user has several independent checkboxes. At least one of then mus

I've published a lot of stuff designed for Chelyabinsk transport over the years :

Let's talk about software lag. By "lag" I don't mean things that take time in general. I mean delays that interrupt the flow of interaction, causing frustration. If your computer is downloading five gigabytes of data, compiling a large project, or renderi

I came away from this year's WWDC keynote surprisingly optimistic. For the past decade, I've been waiting for Apple's marketing department to stop chasing spectacle and let the designers and engineers get back to doing their jobs. Every year the company t

Dear Steve Lemay, Please consider paying some attention to fixing the user interface problems Jony Ive and Alan Dye have made during their years. This list is a mix of general interaction problems, performance issues, inconsistencies, missing feedback, da

In airports and at public transport stops, you often see screens that need to show more information than can physically fit. The usual solution is to cycle through pages, which is poor design. Let's look at an extremely bad example from Hong Kong Internat