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A fresh coat of paint
Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed there’s been a design refresh around here! Unless you’re seeing this in an RSS reader, in which case the image below might give you a bit of a clue what’s changed – you’ll have to come visit the site directly to see for yourself. When I originally migrated this blog…
4–5 minutes -
Liquid Glass and the end of flat design?
I’ve always been a huge fan of the skeuomorphic design of the earlier iPhones, they seemed so quirky, and full of character. I loved all the little details, like how the reflections on the chrome volume slider would react and shimmer, as if light were really reflecting off as you moved the phone around. Or…
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Visual Voicemail is actually pretty great
Yes, I know. I’m sure some of you will be thinking this is a bit of a random post, as you double-check your calendars to make sure that it is indeed the year 2025. Don’t worry, I’m not going to start talking about fax machines and record players, but I wanted to share some recent…
4–6 minutes -
Compact macOS menubar icons
When Apple released macOS 11.0 “Big Sur” back in 2020, one of the changes they made was to increase the gap between icons on the menubar. During development the gap was enormous, but it was eventually toned down for release, based on the negative feedback during testing. People with a lot of menubar apps found…
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Not so smart assistants?
I really like using Siri to get things done when I’m not able to use my phone normally. For example, when cooking I can quickly add things to my shopping list as I’m using them, so I’ll remember to buy more the next time I’m at the supermarket. Or if I’m driving somewhere, I can…
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The Sum of its Parts
I recently started a new job, and one of the upsides is that my computer isn’t locked down into oblivion, so I can actually use a lot of the features that make the Apple ecosystem so great to begin with! Universal Clipboard now works properly, so setting up things like my HR profile was as…
2–3 minutes -
Lakewood City Cinematic
As the release of Cities Skylines 2 draws near, I wanted to give my old city a proper send off, with this cinematic made in the style of a drone video. Lakewood City I’ve been working on for a few years now, adding a park here, a train station there, and slowly growing it to…
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Back to WordPress
The more astute readers out there will have noticed that there’s been a slight design change around here. I’ve actually just finished migrating from Hugo to WordPress. But why? When I first resurrected this blog, I wrote a post about my reasons for selecting a static site generator (Jekyll then Hugo) in the first place.…
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Switching from Docker Desktop to Colima
I use Docker containers to automate the setup of development environments in a standard and repeatable way. It makes it very easy to spin up applications locally during development, and especially to ensure everyone working in a team has a consistent environment. The Docker Engine is actually built on top of a few Linux technologies, including Kernel…
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Switching to Starship
A long time ago, I started experimenting with customising my Bash shell prompt. Rather than just showing the current working directory, I wanted to add snippets of useful information to my prompt. I started with displaying the currently active branch of a Git repository. Next I added code to show which version of a particular…
4–6 minutes