Past 7 days:
Karbon 16-year anniversary 🎉
15-year wedding anniversary 🎉
My mother started chemotherapy 💉
Kiddo with the flu 😷
Flat tire 🛞
Worked about 60 hours 🫠
Cranked out some terrific product requirements 😎
Played a little Marathon 🎮
Fuck cancer. Proud of my mom. Kiddo is feeling much better.
Yesterday, Bungie released their new game, Marathon. Having spent thousands of hours in Destiny and Destiny 2 in the past 10 years, I wrote a long post today about how I'm all-in on Marathon and hoping Bungie can make this game a success: karbonbased.io/posts/2026/03/...
Today's our 15-year wedding anniversary. Last night I worked until 1AM when our son—who has the flu and feels terrible—woke up my wife, which made it impossible for her to fall back asleep. I didn't fall asleep until 4AM. Now I'm downing espresso during meetings while my wife fails to nap. 15 years!
It's 2026 and we're back to Apple's biggest display size being 27 inches. What a disappointment. I don't understand why we're permanently locked into the idea that 27 inches is the biggest a display needs to be.
Over the weekend, we celebrated Karbon's 16-year anniversary. I wrote a little bit about this milestone and what a journey it has been: karbonbased.io/posts/2026/03/...
Between helping them find a lost shoe near the slide or just ending up at the same restaurant down the street a table over, it was always fun to see their rapidly growing family and interact with James and his wife as fellow parents. I'm so sorry for his family to have to go on without him.
On a personal note, when we lived in LA we used to run into James and his wife at our favorite park, us with our kids and them with theirs, and they were both so tuned into their children. They had more kids than us even then, and I openly joked that I didn't know how they were managing it.
Just saw the news about James Van Der Beek dying after his fight with colon cancer. So awful. My generation grew up watching Van Der Beek every week on Dawson's Creek and talking about the episode around the cafeteria the next day. RIP.
Recently, @gruber.foo wrote a DF post (in reply to a New Yorker article by Kyle Chayka) about something near and dear to me: “The Relief of Simple Software”. Today, I wrote about how 22 years ago this became the catalyst for me writing my first native app, xPad: karbonbased.io/posts/2026/0...
@bsky.app Do you have plans to fix the app icon on iPadOS? It doesn’t support dark mode.
Waiting for group buys and parts that have become severely delayed, so keyboards will likely be a mid-to-late hobby resurgence. 😅
Hobbies I am currently putting effort into, when I have free time: Blogging again, photography, modeling for 3D printing, video editing and color correction, gaming, reading, restoring a few old Macs. The free time I end up having for these hobbies? Nearly zero.
Imagine breaking a core feature of macOS that has worked for 40 years just because iPhones have screens with rounded corners.
karbonbased.io/posts/2026/01/...
The year is 2003. I’m 17 years old. I’m watching Democrats fail to appropriately oppose an illegal war for oil.
The year is 2026. I’m 40 years old. I’m watching Democrats fail to appropriately oppose an illegal war for oil.
Prior to playing Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, I kept thinking, "Why did it take Retro 8 years to finish this game?" After playing, I realized that's how long it took to QA collecting all the green crystals in that god-awful desert.
A few follow-ups to "And Stay Out" after reading thoughtful replies from Jason Snell and Eric Schwarz: karbonbased.io/posts/2026/01/...
After reading Louie Mantia's blog post "And Stay Out", some of my thoughts about Alan Dye leaving Apple, Jony Ive's influence on Apple's interface and hardware design before Dye, and the general lack of playfulness in everything Apple makes these days. karbonbased.io/posts/2025/12/...
All of these things are true:
1. Alan Dye should never have had the role he did at Apple
2. Dye damaged Apple's software for years (and for years to come)
3. Tim Cook should have removed him long ago
4. It's a huge win for Apple's users that he left
5. Meta has such poor taste that they wanted him
If someone told Shawn and me when we made that film that people would still talk about it fondly 16 years later, I don’t think we would have believed them. We’re incredibly lucky that it stuck with so many people.
What a kind thing to say! I really appreciate it. And I agree, I still have such cherished memories of that era of Vimeo.
Our older son turned 13 today, so we are now the parents of a teenager. We feel too young to have a kid this old, but as we barrel through our mid-40s, I think it's probably time to stop thinking that way. The time dilation effect of watching children grow continues to increase.
People bombarding me with "why do you care if Liquid Glass sucks or doesn't!" seem to forget or not realize it is LITERALLY MY JOB TO CARE. It is my business. I have made my living for the past 16 years building apps for people and clients on these platforms. I am also a user of these platforms.
Yes, but that was the argument BEFORE this... that Liquid Glass was good and worth it, heading toward the future, etc. But this Settings addition makes it clear that is NOT the case, considering you can just turn it off.
Alan Dye told us this was the future of all platforms, critical, amazing, and beautiful. And here we are, at 26.1, allowing users to just totally opt-out. They didn't even make it ONE CALENDAR QUARTER before starting to roll it back. Why would anyone invest in Liquid Glass now?
Think about how many collective millions of dollars in time and effort have been spent by developers and designers to try to adopt Liquid Glass in the past year, only to have Apple start to walk it back on the very first minor release since launch. This is an admission, and embarrassing.
What a complete and total embarrassment.
Plan is to get these out the door by next month, but as this is a passion/side-project, it's hard to find the time for it prioritized against everything else going on. But I'm getting there, slowly. Appreciate your patience! For now, though, the apps should all continue to work, just without glass.
In a similar vein, iPad is a disaster, as now it supports all sorts of sizes and Breathable's configuration app has always been a bit of a visual hack on iPad (basically an iPhone size wrapped in padding), so I am rewriting parts of that too.
While moving the iOS app to OS 26 was not terribly challenging, the drastic changes to how the Catalyst app looks and works on macOS 26 required I rewrite large portions of it to work properly. I'm making good progress, but not done just yet.
Just a quick note that while work is on-going to bring Breathable into the world of OSes 26, I've just released version 3.0.2, a compatibility update to ensure things continue to function properly in the meantime. breathable.app
