Design Systems where APIs and URL structures aren’t first-class citizens will begin to struggle. For UX designers, the ability to apply design thinking in the creation of APIs, URLs, and CLIs will become a valuable and differentiating skill set.
It’s funny we moan about AI writing slop, but give humans a pass. I think the “I got tired of [blank] so I built [blank]” is just as prevalent as “you’re absolutely right”
Oh nice, custom selects in Safari developer.apple.com/documentatio...
This is one of the most discouraging aspects of OSS maintenance. “We love your product. LOL of course we can’t pay for it”. There really should be some general fund or OSS tax levied against corporations.
Do other designer/developers when working on solo projects work really messy? Like hopping back and forth between design tools and coding tools never quite finishing things in either, but getting a finished product? Can’t tell if that’s an early era web trait or just a weird me thing.
What if Design Tokens aren’t the single source of truth?
One design system decision I was steadfast in denying was custom select elements. Spending the last few weeks filling out applications reinforced my decision. Most are truly awful; the fraction that aren’t are at best on par with the native element.
When it comes to UX and AI, I believe we’re still in the pre-mouse, pre-Doug Engelbart era of HCI. In part because for 50+ years we’ve been iterating on the same conceptual interaction models. Very few UX/HCI folks are versed in thinking across new vistas.
Now I want to create that web component.
I don’t know what I would use this for, but polling weather from shortcuts allows you to trigger an action based on distances, including light years.
the new `sign()` feature can help here as well. This is super messy, but was something rattling around in my brain.
codepen.io/dmcalester/p...
Kudos to @duckduckgo.com for their migration of previous AI chats to their new domain. The copy is very easy to understand, the process is super simple and didn’t feel like a road-block in getting my task accomplished.
The Stickies app in macOS is still one of the best things Apple ever shipped. No cloud integration, a UI that’s so timeless it has escaped all the trends: aqua, brushed metal, liquid glass. It even has one of my favorite lost macOS features: Window Shade.
The Stickies app in macOS is still one of the best things Apple ever shipped. No cloud integration, a UI that’s so timeless it has escaped all the trends: aqua, brushed metal, liquid glass. It even has one of my favorite lost macOS features: Window Shade.
Tailscale
Love this inspector on Zed.dev’s theme builder for exploring tokens. The future of manually using tokens seems fuzzy in the age of AI, but for me, exposing tokens in context is way more useful than spec diagrams or token lists. https://zed.dev/theme-builder
Slack is the 5th largest app on my system. Bigger than Chrome, Safari, Garage Band, Pixelmator … crazy. Web app "Saved to Dock” is 200K.
Pro tip for anyone setting up a headless Mac for something like Clawdbot. Turn off Universal Control on the headless machine or you end up in an endless loop that freezes your main machine.
Automating my blinds to handle glare on my monitor has been great, except at least once a day I get a jump scare when the motor kicks in.
Has the used market for MacBooks completely dried up? In the past they’ve gone in days. I’ve had a good quality M2 Air on Craigslist, Nextdoor, et. al., and no movement for 6+ weeks.
Curiously WebKit release notes dedicate a whole section to MathML peer to other core technologies (HTML, CSS, SVG, DevTools). Always strikes me as odd it’s so prominently featured as it seems so niche. Though I get it semantically.
2 recent finds:
Mole - a CLI tool to find cruft. Great for those super old NPM/PIP directories github.com/tw93/Mole
PortKiller - for monitoring and killing all those servers I forget I spun up and can never remember the right lsof command github.com/productdevbo...
People would look at this flat design and never ascribe the skeuomorphic label, but it is as skeuomorphic as anything Apple did in the Jobs/Forstall era of iOS.
Parallel complaint(?) I wish the web platform would allow independently using 24 hour time irrespective of of the system clock.
💛 though I think you might be referring to AstroJS, I was the co-creator of AstroUXDS which was a DS for satellite operations applications. Though we did use AstroJS for the docs site.
Also in a former life I worked on 50+ Congressional web sites, it would have been so much easier had USWDS been around back then.
18F was one of our North Stars and aspirational targets when building Astro. The conviction was that design was more than just aesthetics. It was a tremendous honor when folks from the team reached out to us about how we approached Web Components in government environments.
I love how much I can use AI to solve paper-cuts. The glare on my monitor at certain times of the year is terrible. It’s something I could have done, but the time/effort calculus just wasn't worth it. A 10 minute Claude session and 15 minutes writing a Shortcut was.
github.com/dmcalester/g...
2026 Goals
Interop is easily my favorite standards effort of the modern era. Every year I eagerly await the announcement of focus areas and follow the progress almost too closely.
In an era where we’re fortunate to have some pretty good science fiction on TV (that isn’t just an action movie set in the future), Pantheon really stood out. I wish it were available on physical media, as it’s one I’d like to “own”.
