Reading List

The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.

Before and After: MacOS 27 Golden Gate Beta 1’s App Icons

Basic Apple Guy, back during WWDC:

WWDC always brings a torrent of new content, details, and platform-wide changes. One of the first things I noticed after installing the macOS Golden Gate beta was the updated icon design. The colours are much bolder, several icons have been adjusted, and the refraction in the Liquid Glass effect has changed significantly, especially in icons like Journal.

There’s also a noticeable sharpness to the icons, along with a flattening of the Liquid Glass effect. I’m not sure yet whether this is simply an early-beta artifact or the intended final look.

I think it’s definitely the intended look, and I like it. The changes in these app icons are all subtle, but they’re all changes for the better. I still don’t like the primitive flat shapes and mandated squircle, but at least the trend is finally moving in the right direction again.

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Another One for the ‘Sorry, We Used to Be Crap’ Truth-in-Advertising File: Carlsberg Beer

Ben Chapman, reporting for The Independent in 2019:

After 40 years of advertising its lager as “Probably the best beer in the world”, Danish brewer Carlsberg has confessed that the famous slogan may not be true. Reacting to falling sales and increasingly harsh comments from drinkers about the taste of its beer, Carlsberg has launched a new recipe along with a more honest approach to marketing.

The campaign declares: “Probably not the best beer in the world. So we’ve changed it. Somewhere along the line, we lost our way. We focused on brewing quantity, not quality. We became one of the cheapest, not the best.”

As part of the new ad campaign Carlsberg is sharing negative comments about the old beer including, “Carlsberg tastes like stale breadsticks” and another comparing it to “drinking the bathwater your nan died in”.

I drank a Carlsberg once. Once.

‘What’s the Deal With Old Guys and Giant Glasses?’

Early adoption of new technology is generally considered a young-person thing, but maybe Snap Specs will turn that notion on its head. Direct sales in retirement homes?

SwiftUI in appleOS 27

macOS Golden Gate 27 Beta Release Notes: AsyncImage now automatically caches downloaded images using HTTP caching protocols, allowing servers to control caching behavior via standard headers. […] Xcode 27 introduces a new @State implementation that avoids this repeated evaluation. This new behavior back-deploys to iOS 17 aligned OSes. The new @State is implemented with a […]