I’m open to work. Sorry to start this weeknote with a blatant plug, but it is what it is. A long-term engagement ended last week, and I’m now looking for what’s next. If you or anyone you know needs someone to smash some words into shape (articles, case studies, press releases, App Store page copy, poems about your favourite giraffe, etc), please let me know.

WWDC25 happened. You probably noticed. I wrote about it:

• Liquid Glass: Apple vs accessibility digs into the accessibility implications of Apple’s new design language.
• Apple’s Liquid Glass looks like it’s beamed in from the movies. I don’t think that’s a good thing is a broader response to the aesthetic decisions Apple has made.
• Hands on with iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 – what’s slick and what’s half-glassed? in turn looks at Liquid Glass, unified iPhone app layouts, and iPad windowing.
• I got hands on with the next-gen iPad software: has Apple finally fixed iPad multitasking? is a deeper dive hands-on with the new iPad windowing system, which I really like.
• The quiet exit of the Home indicator in iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 is another positive piece, with Apple (in the earliest dev betas at least) fixing one of my long-standing gripes about iOS and iPadOS.

Here are some of my favourite WWDC25 pieces from others:

• Joanna Stern’s superb interview with Apple software chief Craig Federighi and marketing head Greg Joswiak: full interview | short version.
• Fidelity in design by Howard Oakley criticises Apple’s ongoing obsession with windows that have rounded corners. As I’ve said elsewhere, it half feels like the next macOS will have fully circular windows. Even today, rounded corners cause other problems, not least on iPadOS.
• WWDC25: macOS Tahoe Breaks Decades of Finder History by Stephen Hackett skewers the abysmal redesign of Finder’s icon.
• Clip got stuck in notarization hell, says creator Riley Testut, with Apple rejecting his app because it didn’t do anything if Full Access wasn’t enabled. Thing is, that’s none of Apple’s business with an app for a third-party app store, like this one is. This is surely yet another DMA violation the EU won’t be happy about.
• Craig Federighi sounded like he was taking the piss with this exclamation: “Wow! More windows, a pointier pointer and a menu bar? Who’d have thought? We’ve truly pulled off a mindblowing release!” Maybe he was trying to acknowledge that Apple, after many years, had finally reached an obvious fix for iPad interactions. At best, something got lost in the edit.

Phew. Moving on. Ish…

The Apple Games app falls short. Huge shock, I’m sure. I wrote about my hopes for it last month. Here’s how Apple fared with my wish list:

1. Nail the basics: All covered, but sometimes implemented poorly.
2. Highlight controller support: Surprisingly, yes. But buried (Library > hamburger).
3. Add landscape support: Yes.
4. Embrace openness (LOL): Indeed a LOL so far – not even any app pinning, which is insane.
5. Recommend good games: No better than App Store, alas.
6. Not get bored after 11 seconds: We shall see…

Also on games, Daryl Baxter argued Apple should draw on the Pippin for a new iPhone gaming controller. Brave bringing up Pippin at all, but I get where he’s coming from in wanting a controller that could have AirPods-like multi-device pairing. However, I’d be concerned Apple would try to reinvent gamepads, like it did during the MFi disaster.

However, I disagree with Baxter’s argument that “other inputs work terribly with gaming”, by which he means non-traditional ones. With conventional gaming, sure, touchscreens aren’t ideal. But when you design specifically for them, that forces you to rethink gaming conventions, which can lead to innovative ideas. The problem today is relatively few games are iPhone-first because Apple pissed off so many devs. Instead, games come to the iPhone from other platforms, where they’re designed for gamepads. That makes the touchscreen’s perceived limitations more apparent.

AI is still doing bad things. I enjoyed a quote from planetmatt on Bluesky: “AI looks impressive in every area in which you are not a subject matter expert. In that area, it’s always a joke.”

I’m seeing this a lot these days, notably from people who think ChatGPT can generate amazing copy because it can write better than they can. But it falls short of what writers can do. Turns out, ChatGPT also falls short of an Atari 2600 when playing chess and in, um, not driving people mad. Oh dear. One piece of AI good news, though: Wikipedia has paused AI-gen summaries after an editor backlash. As Suw wryly noted on Bluesky: “But… most Wikipedia articles already have a summary. It’s the first few paragraphs at the top of the page.”

More things!

Good news in apps: superb camera Obscura has been added to my classic apps series. Thanks to Ben Rice McCarthy for their thoughtful answers.

Bad news in apps: Sega discontinues Sega Forever mobile games. In hindsight, that series didn’t have the smartest name.

Bank warnings have jumped the shark. It’s bad enough when I get scary warnings when making purchases on national retailer websites. But this week I got one when transferring money between two accounts with a bank, while using the bank’s own website. Naturally, this is banks shifting responsibility on to customers. When a customer gets scammed, the bank will say they were warned. But they’re training users just to click OK for everything.

New coeliac tests incoming. A report claims this will remove the need for a ‘gluten challenge’, where you test for coeliac disease by consuming loads of gluten over a period of weeks. Despite many years of increasingly serious issues that may map to coeliac, I’ve never had a test. I’d be too scared, because it would leave me bedridden and unable to function. So this new news is very good news.

Twitter isn’t coming back – ever. I’m still seeing people on Bluesky (and, very occasionally, Mastodon) sad that Twitter is gone. To be fair, when I left in 2023, it was a wrench. Lots of friends and communities were lost to me. But even then, I missed what Twitter was, not what it had become. Today, I very rarely venture on to X, but have sanity-checked my ‘filter’ feeds, and most of the folks I followed have gone too. Maybe half are now on Bluesky and Mastodon. I’ve no idea about the others.

There still seems to be this idea we can somehow press a magic button to bring Twitter back, but it was a moment in time. Even if X wasn’t a hellhole today, the way the world has changed would make it a very different place from back in 2015. And, as it is, X is a ghoul wearing Twitter’s bloody corpse as a onesie. Enough.

No-mow May has become no-mow June. Again. And I’m fine with that. I enjoy letting the front garden grow and just seeing what happens. It feels alive, unlike gardens mown like a buzzcut every week. We have crickets and gigantic Oxeye daisies. The mow-happy… don’t.