More vintage graphic-design weekend fun — this time, a collection of Milwaukee bus tickets from the late 1940s to early 1950s, collected on the Present & Correct blog. So much variety in the colors and typography, but yet they all feel branded together. Think about the care and thought here. Whoever was making these was designing one for each week, every week — and it’s so clear they loved making them. Even something as mundane as weekly bus passes can be exuberant expressions of fun.

(Via Ian K. Rogers, who particularly notes the tickets’ integration of hand-lettering with typefaces.)

My thanks to Typotheque for sponsoring last week at DF to promote Zed, their incredible new font superfamily. Zed is a type system that was developed with one question in mind: what do readers actually need? Not what looks good in a type specimen, but what works for the widest possible range of readers. Typotheque tested Zed with visually impaired patients at a French ophthalmology hospital and found that Zed Text outperformed Helvetica in terms of reading speed across all patient groups. Designed from scratch to perform different functions, it comes in two optical versions — Text and Display — with four variable axes and support for 547 languages, including endangered ones.

Zed is extremely practical, both in terms of its extraordinarily broad language support and the stylistic variations available via its adjustable width, weight, roundness, and slant. It even offers Braille characters and an icon font. But Zed is also simply beautiful. It’s a font family and type system that exemplifies the belief that rich accessibility and pure aesthetic appeal are not at odds.

When you purchase a license for Zed, you’re buying it directly from the designers. It’s just lovely, and you should check it out. (Don’t miss the short introductory video, either.)

The New York Times:

In a surprisingly early and gracious concession speech in Budapest, Mr. Orban congratulated the opposition saying, “The responsibility and opportunity to govern were not given to us.” But, he also made a vow: “We are not giving up. Never, never, never.”

His defeat paves the way for Peter Magyar, a former Orban loyalist and the leader of the main opposition party, to take over as Hungary’s prime minister once the newly elected Parliament meets.

Political Wire:

Orban said the “election results, although not complete, are understandable and clear. They are painful for us but unequivocal.”

There we have it: Viktor Orban — a MAGA star and general anti-democratic corrupt dirtbag — is a better and bigger man than Donald Trump, who still refuses to concede the 2020 election that he unequivocally lost to Joe Biden.

Hannah Murphy, reporting for the Financial Times (paywalled, but Ars Technica has a no-paywall syndicated copy):

The company recently began prioritising a Zuckerberg AI character, three of the people said.

The Meta chief is personally involved in training and testing his animated AI, which could offer conversation and feedback to employees, according to one person. They added that the character is being trained on the billionaire’s mannerisms, tone and publicly available statements, as well as his own recent thinking on company strategies, so that employees might feel more connected to the founder through interactions with it.

This is so straight out of every dystopian sci-fi film about an evil corporation that it’s hard to believe.

Top comment on Hacker News, from “flibbityflob”:

How will a machine ever replace his famous warmth or empathy?

Marcin Wichary, at Unsung:

Go to Settings > Accessibility > Zoom, and then turn on “Use scroll gesture with modifier keys to zoom.”

Then, at any moment, you can hold Control and swipe with two fingers (or use a scroll wheel) up or down to zoom the entire screen.

I’d also recommend turning off “Smooth images” under “Advanced…” so you see individual pixels better.

This is one of the very best MacOS tips. No third-party software. Built into MacOS for several (many?) years now. Incredibly useful.

But I had no idea it existed until last June at WWDC. It was Monday, after the morning keynote and just before the afternoon State of the Union. Beautiful sunny day at Apple Park. I ran into my old friend Cabel Sasser, and, maniac that he is, he’d already installed the first Tahoe developer beta on his MacBook Pro. So I sat next to him and we started examining the UI changes in detail. And Cabel was zooming in and out instantaneously. I was like, “Whoa, how are you doing that?” And Cabel was like, “You don’t know about the Accessibility Zoom gesture? Here, let me show you!” And my mind was blown. Cabel emphasized the importance of going into the “Advanced…” dialog to turn off “Smooth images”, and I agree. This is a fantastic feature, but Apple has the default setting wrong for smoothing (a.k.a. blurring) the zoomed image. I honestly can’t imagine why anyone would want the zoomed image blurred.

Anyway, then we both laughed ourselves silly and made ourselves a little queasy examining, in detail, just how bad the Tahoe UI was. And I thought to myself, I need to post this as a tip on Daring Fireball.

Well, it took 10 months, but Wichary posting it on Unsung reminded me that I never posted about it here. [Update: Actually...] Turn this on, start using it, and you’ll find yourself using it every day if you care about design details.

Bonus tip: Subscribe to Wichary’s Unsung in your RSS reader. He’s only been posting there since early December, and it quickly became one of my favorite blogs in the world. One of those blogs where I’m excited every time I see there’s a new post. I would read a post from Wichary describing what it’s like to watch paint dry, because I know he’d only write about it if he noticed something interesting and nuanced. Because he’s only been writing Unsung for a few months, you can catch up on the whole thing.

I’d never before heard of this museum, but now that I’ve seen Wichary’s photos, I want to go. Unsurprisingly, a lot of his shots are details of vintage keyboards. I keep pausing on this one, a “RE-START” key with the word broken across two lines. It’s clearly wrong but somehow feels right.

I’m linking to his album at Flickr, but he posted a long thread of images to Mastodon too.

Bryan Chaffin, two weeks ago:

John Martellaro was good man. He was not only a better man than me, he was one of the best people I knew. It is with a heavy heart that I tell you Mr. Martellaro passed away today.

He rose to the rank of Captain in the U.S. Air Force, and he was a NASA scientist. He worked for years at Apple, and most importantly to me, he was a columnist and the voice of reason and humanity at The Mac Observer. He wrote SciFi and a variety of tech columns for several other Mac sites, too.

Michael Tsai:

He wrote for many Mac publications. Just his author page at TMO has 83 pages of article summaries.

One of Martellaro’s columns I most remember was one I linked to in January 2010, “How Apple Does Controlled Leaks”:

Often Apple has a need to let information out, unofficially. The company has been doing that for years, and it helps preserve Apple’s consistent, official reputation for never talking about unreleased products. I know, because when I was a Senior Marketing Manager at Apple, I was instructed to do some controlled leaks.

The way it works is that a senior exec will come in and say, “We need to release this specific information. John, do you have a trusted friend at a major outlet? If so, call him/her and have a conversation. Idly mention this information and suggest that if it were published, that would be nice. No e-mails!”

Inexplicably, the original piece is no longer hosted at The Mac Observer, but thankfully the Internet Archive has it. What’s interesting about this particular leak, to The Wall Street Journal, is that it came just three weeks before the introduction of the first iPad, and this was the story that pegged the price of the “new multimedia tablet device” at “about $1,000”.

The actual starting price of the iPad was $500, which made the purpose of the leak — if indeed it was a deliberate strategy from Apple leadership — pretty obvious. A $500 price looks pretty good if everyone is expecting a $500 price. But a $500 price is cause for celebration if everyone is expecting it to cost $1,000. It’s a way of under-promising and over-delivering without ever having promised a damn thing.

Another one worth revisiting is this post from December 2011, where I linked to a Martellaro column in which he declared that the success of the Amazon Kindle Fire necessitated that Apple build a 7-inch iPad. “Noted for future claim chowder,” I wrote. Well, Apple debuted the iPad Mini in October 2012.

I never did revisit Martellaro’s accurate prediction. Rest in peace, and enjoy the posthumous Being Right Point.

Tuomas Hämäläinen, on Mastodon:

We’re at Mac OS 26.4 and seems like the accessibility toggles should be way more considered than they are.

Here’s a comparison between “Reduce transparency” off and on. How does it make sense that turning this setting on actually reduces contrast between the background and the UI elements? Buttons and sidebars get this grey cast, which makes them almost blend in with the drop shadows.

Tahoe looks like Huawei’s rushed rip-off of what Tahoe should be.

Welp, turns out I wrote an entire post about the Control-scroll zoom-in-and-out feature all the way back in 2006, when it was a new feature in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. Somehow, between 2006 and last year, I completely forgot about it. I don’t think it helps that the settings moved from the Mouse panel to the Zoom sub-section inside Accessibility. But I’ve used it so much in the last year, since rediscovering it, that I can’t believe I ever forgot it. Anyway, after I posted about it earlier today, a few people told me they could swear they learned about it here, long ago. They were right!

Federico Viticci:

Today, I’m very happy to introduce Apple Frames 4, a major update to my shortcut for framing screenshots taken on Apple devices with official Apple product bezels. Apple Frames 4 is a complete rethinking of the shortcut that is noticeably faster, updated to support all the latest Apple devices, and designed to support even more personalization options. For the first time ever, Apple Frames supports multiple colors for each device, allowing you to mix and match different colored bezels for each framed screenshot; it also supports proportional scaling when merging screenshots from different Apple devices.

But that’s not all. In addition to an updated shortcut, I’m also releasing the Apple Frames CLI, an open source command-line utility that lets developers and tinkerers automate the process of framing screenshots directly from the Mac’s Terminal. And there’s more: the Apple Frames CLI is also designed to work with AI agents, and it comes with a Claude Code/Codex skill that lets coding agents take care of framing dozens or even hundreds of screenshots in just a few seconds, from any folder on your Mac.

David Smith:

I’ve been using this recently and it is super helpful. I must frame dozens of screenshots a week and always looking for more efficient workflows for it.

The Playlist:

The first pitch, he said, goes back to 2008, and it was already pretty radical by Bond standards. “I had pitched in 2008 the idea to Barbara Broccoli of a parallel franchise,” Soderbergh said. “Set in the ’60s, R-rated, violent, sexy. Fictional backstory to real historical events, different actor, different universe.” [...]

That version was designed to open up a different, more lo-fi, stripped-down, and cost-effective way of making Bond movies, but not a replacement for them. “[It would be] cheaply made, where you get people like me, who are interested in that approach to do one of these things,” Soderbergh explained. “It’s just another lane that exists totally separate from the normal Bond movies.”

Broccoli and company, he said, were at least open enough to hear it out. “They were intrigued,” Soderbergh said. “But didn’t move forward.”

This hurts — it hurts to ponder what could have been.

John Calhoun, on Bluesky (and also a new blog):

I re-made Glider some years back for MacOS/iOS. It broke at some point (perhaps an Apple change for Retina displays?) so I pulled it from the App Store.

(Claude looked at the code — found some minor coordinate issues. Thanks!) Glider Classic for MacOS is back on.

11 years between version 1.0.4 and yesterday’s 1.1 looks like a long time. But when you consider that Calhoun shipped the original Glider back in 1988, that puts things in perspective. If you’ve never used Glider, it remains an all-time great procrastination utility. There aren’t many Mac apps still in development from that era.

(Calhoun, you will recall, in addition to making a slew of early Mac games, went on to a long career as an engineer at Apple, where, amongst other things, he worked on Preview for many years. He now makes cool personal projects like SystemSix and this excellent model of the Pan Am Orion that was in some old movie.)

Richard Moss, back in 2010:

John Calhoun’s Glider games hold a special place in the history of Mac gaming, acting almost as an icon of the platform through much of the 1990s. They spawned a hugely dedicated fan base, which produced a ridiculous amount of original content both for and about Glider — especially Glider 4 and Glider PRO, the later versions.

I caught up with Calhoun over email recently, and quizzed him on the origins and development of the series. This is the first part of that interview. Read on to discover where the idea for Glider originated, how the game came to exist, and how it dramatically altered Calhoun’s future.

Here’s the updated working link to part 2 of the interview, and to Moss’s feature story, “Dreaming of a Thousand-Room House: The History and Making of Glider”. The links to those pages in part 1 of the interview are both out of date and result in 404s.

Moss, of course, is the author of the excellent book The Secret History of Mac Gaming, which features an entire chapter on Calhoun and Glider, aptly titled “Quintessentially Mac”.

Speaking of John Calhoun, he chimed in on a Hacker News thread last month regarding his experience working with Steve Lemay at Apple:

I think Steve Lemay is a good guy. I kind of fought with him when I was an engineer, he was a young, new designer (at Apple). But I always respected his point of view — even when we argued.

When Jobs came back to Apple in the latter 1990’s “Design” slowly came to have an outsized role. I was one half of the engineering team that owned Preview (the application) when Steve Lemay became a seemingly regular presence in the hallway. As the new “Aqua” UI elements arrived in the OS like the “drawer” and toolbar, Steve and his boss (forgetting his name right now — Greg Somebody?) were often making calls about our UI implementation.

I guarantee that was Greg Christie, who is in my opinion the least-known-but-most-missed person at Apple.

Steve Lemay insisted the drawer live on the right side of the window. This was inexplicable to me. I saw the layout of Preview as hierarchical: the left side of the content driving the right side. You click a thumbnail on the left (in the drawer) the window content on the right changes to reflect the thumbnail clicked on.

Steve said, no, drawer on the right.

“Why? Why the hell would we do that?”

Steve was quick: “The Preview app is about the content. The content is king.”

I admit that I still disagreed with him after the exchange, but I had a new respect for him as a designer because he was able to articulate a rationale for his decision. I suppose I was prejudiced to expect hand-waving from designers.

It’s a good sign when you lose an argument but gain respect for those arguing the opposing side. (And, Calhoun notes, the Preview sidebar eventually did move to the left, after split views replaced drawers in AppKit.)

(Addendum: Steve also invented the early Safari URL text field that also doubled as a progress bar. Instant hate from me when I saw it: it was as if the text of the URL you entered was being selected as the page loaded. So I’m old-school and Steve had some new ideas…)

I had the same reaction as Calhoun when I first wrote about Safari, two days after it was announced and released as a public beta at Macworld Expo in January 2003. (That was a year before I created Markdown, so I had to edit raw HTML just now to update a few broken links to working versions at the Internet Archive.) I wrote then:

Progress Bar Behind Location Field
Hideous. It looks like partially-selected text. Please scrap it.

But by 2009, reviewing the public beta of Safari 4, I had changed my mind, and admitted I was wrong in my initial assessment of the progress-bar-in-location-field combo control:

But I quickly grew accustomed to it, and soon grew to miss it when using other browsers. It was, I soon decided, a damn clever way to show progress in a way that was prominent while the page was actually loading, and without taking up any additional space on the screen after loading was complete.

That innovation is a nice feather in Lemay’s cap.

Amazon:

Today Amazon.com, Inc. and Globalstar, Inc. announced that they have entered into a definitive merger agreement under which Amazon will acquire Globalstar, enabling Amazon Leo to add direct-to-device (D2D) services to its low Earth orbit satellite network and extend cellular coverage to customers beyond the reach of terrestrial networks. In addition, Amazon and Apple announced an agreement for Amazon Leo to power satellite services for iPhone and Apple Watch, including Emergency SOS via satellite. [...]

Greg Joswiak, quoted in Amazon’s press release:

“Apple and Amazon have a long and proven track record of working together through Amazon’s core infrastructure services, and we look forward to building on that collaboration with Amazon Leo. This ensures our users will continue to have access to the vital satellite features they have come to rely on, including Emergency SOS, Messages, Find My, and Roadside Assistance via satellite, so they can stay safe and connected while off the grid.”

The Verge’s headline catches my initial reaction: “Apple and Amazon Are Teaming Up to Challenge Starlink’s Smartphone Ambitions”. Apple owned a 20 percent stake in Globalstar, so they were more than a bystander. But I think the deal speaks to the fact that amongst the tech titans, Apple and Amazon are more allies than rivals.

Google, on their Search Central Blog:

Today, we are expanding our spam policies to address a deceptive practice known as “back button hijacking”, which will become an explicit violation of the “malicious practices” of spam policies, leading to potential spam actions.

What is back button hijacking?
When a user clicks the “back” button in the browser, they have a clear expectation: they want to return to the previous page. Back button hijacking breaks this fundamental expectation. It occurs when a site interferes with a user’s browser navigation and prevents them from using their back button to immediately get back to the page they came from. Instead, users might be sent to pages they never visited before, be presented with unsolicited recommendations or ads, or are otherwise just prevented from normally browsing the web.

Why are we taking action?
We believe that the user experience comes first. Back button hijacking interferes with the browser’s functionality, breaks the expected user journey, and results in user frustration.

Good for Google to penalize sites playing such dirty tricks, but, if they believe the user experience comes first, why are they only addressing this now in 2026? Here’s a Reddit thread from 15 years ago: “Why the fuck do websites hijack the back button? Its fucking annoying”. And why are they waiting until June to enforce it? Penalize these dickheads now.

I don’t see much back-button hijacking personally, perhaps because I don’t visit sketchy websites, but this entire issue only exists because of JavaScript. If web pages were documents, this wouldn’t even be possible.

Ryan Christoffel, 9to5Mac:

On the iPhone and iPad, Apple made the new Creator Studio features available as updates to the existing App Store releases.

On the Mac though, the rollout was a lot more confusing. Apple kept the old iWork apps for Mac available on the App Store and launched entirely separate iWork versions with the Creator Studio features. Starting today, though, that oddity is no more. Per Aaron Perris, Apple has officially removed the old Pages, Keynote, and Numbers apps from the App Store.

If you’ve previously downloaded these apps, you’ll still find them in your download history and can re-download from there. But new users will only see one option on the App Store: the Creator Studio-compatible apps.

One reason — perhaps the reason? — this was necessarily more complex on MacOS is that the iWork apps used to have different bundle identifiers on iOS and Mac. On the Mac, the old (classic?) version of Keynote has the bundle identifier com.apple.iWork.Keynote. On iOS, it was always just com.apple.Keynote, without the iWork part. To make the single-subscription bundle work across both platforms, Apple seemingly needed to unify the bundle IDs, and they unified them using the iOS versions, sans the iWork part. The new Creator Studio versions of the Mac apps now have the same bundle IDs as the iOS versions. You can see this using Terminal, if, like me, you currently have both versions of these apps installed side-by-side:

% mdls -name kMDItemCFBundleIdentifier -r \
    /Applications/Numbers.app 

Result: com.apple.iWork.Numbers

% mdls -name kMDItemCFBundleIdentifier -r \
    /Applications/Numbers\ Creator\ Studio.app

Result: com.apple.Numbers

You can also see from the above that while the display names for the new versions remain just “Keynote”, “Numbers”, and “Pages”, the actual names of the .app bundles in the file system are now “Keynote Creator Studio.app”, “Numbers Creator Studio.app”, and “Pages Creator Studio.app”. That’s how two apps that both appear to have the same name can exist next to each other in the same Applications folder.

I’ll leave the final word to Basic Apple Guy:

Goodbye Keynote, Numbers, and Pages, and long live Keynote: Design Presentations, Numbers: Make Spreadsheets, and Pages: Create Documents

The Houston Chronicle:

Kristin Tips, the longtime presiding officer of the embattled Texas Funeral Service Commission, is no longer on the board. “Governor Abbott appreciates Kristin Tips’ service,” Andrew Mahaleris, Abbott’s press secretary, said in an email Tuesday. “An announcement on a replacement will be made at a later date.” [...]

Tips, who has run San Antonio’s prestigious Mission Park Funeral Chapels, Cemeteries & Crematories with her husband, Dick Tips, was appointed to the board by the governor in 2017 and made the presiding officer in May 2024. Tips did not respond to a request for comment.

I don’t have any questions for her, but I have at least one for her husband.

Tim Hardwick, last week at MacRumors:

Apple’s first foldable iPhone may not carry the speculative media-derived “Fold” branding after all, according to Chinese leaker Digital Chat Station. In a new post on Weibo, the oft-accurate leaker claimed that Apple’s book-style foldable could launch as the “iPhone Ultra.” Meanwhile, domestic Chinese manufacturers are allegedly deciding whether to follow Apple’s lead by tentatively branding their own upcoming foldables as “Ultra” models, but likely with a lighter price tag — Apple’s version is expected to cost between $2,000 and $2,500.

I have no inside knowledge about what Apple plans to name this device, but I’ll eat my proverbial hat if they name it “iPhone Fold”. That name is so dumb it’s what Samsung calls their foldables. You don’t name a device for what it does, you name it for what it connotes. A good name conveys feeling, not just function. “iPhone Ultra” or “iPhone Max” would both work, and Ultra sounds more luxe. So while unsurprising, that’s probably the best bet, even without the reliable word of Mr. Digital Chat Station.

But if you want my take on a wildcard name, one with some history, how about “iPhone Duo”?

Molly White, at Web3 Is Going Just Great:

After a fake version of the Ledger cryptocurrency wallet app made it onto the normally highly curated Apple App store, customers lost $9.5 million dollars to the malicious product. Believing it was a genuine Ledger product, people entered their seed phrases into the app, then discovered their wallets were immediately drained.

One victim, a musician who goes by G. Love, wrote: “I lost my retirement fund in a hack/Scam when I switched my Ledger over to my new computer and by accident downloaded a malicious ledger app from the Apple store. All my BTC gone in an instant.” According to him, he lost 5.9 BTC (~$445,000).

The legit (if that adjective can be used for cryptocurrency apps) Ledger Live Mac app is only available as a direct download from Ledger’s website. They also do have an app in the App Store, but it’s iPhone-only.