{"version": "https://jsonfeed.org/version/1.1", "title": "zerosleeps", "home_page_url": "https://zerosleeps.com/", "feed_url": "https://zerosleeps.com/feed.json", "description": "The 10 most recent blog posts on zerosleeps.com", "favicon": "https://zerosleeps.com/static/core/apple-touch-icon.703a48268c28.png", "authors": [{"name": "Scott Macpherson"}], "language": "en-AU", "items": [{"id": "/blog/2026/8/10/toggles/", "url": "https://zerosleeps.com/blog/2026/8/10/toggles/", "title": "Toggles", "content_html": "

A thousand times yes to this post from Lukas Mathis regarding toggles in user interfaces, especially if all toggles shown are in the same state:

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Is this toggle on or off? If you don’t already know that “left” means “off” and “right” means “on”, you have absolutely no way to tell.

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My favourite is this one that’s in a hideous bit of enterprise software I have to use every day:

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It’s been like this for years and I still have no idea which thing is active.

", "date_published": "2026-08-10T02:28:16Z"}, {"id": "/blog/2026/8/2/promotion-is-related-to-firefox-energy-consumption/", "url": "https://zerosleeps.com/blog/2026/8/2/promotion-is-related-to-firefox-energy-consumption/", "title": "ProMotion is related to Firefox energy consumption?", "content_html": "

Ooh I uncovered this report on Bugzilla this morning and yeah I reckon there’s something to it. I have many gripes with Firefox at the moment but energy consumption is probably number one.

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Here’s my M4’s CPU history as reported by Activity Monitor when watching a full-screen YouTube video in Firefox with ProMotion (Apple’s name for variable refresh rate) enabled:

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And here’s the same setup, same video, but with my screen’s refresh rate set to 60Hz:

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I’ve owned a couple of M-series MacBooks now and the efficiency cores are magical wizardry that use almost no energy at all. You can pin ‘em all day and your Mac won’t get warm and it will sip electricity. Not so much with the performance cores.

", "date_published": "2026-08-02T02:13:05Z"}, {"id": "/blog/2026/7/31/orion/", "url": "https://zerosleeps.com/blog/2026/7/31/orion/", "title": "Orion", "content_html": "

Perhaps I was a bit hasty in my dismissal of Orion. I’ve been driving it this week and it’s really good. I haven’t encountered any real negatives.

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Let’s run through my list: it’s very Mac-assed. It seems delightfully energy efficient. And it hasn’t done anything remotely creepy or annoying. Quite the opposite in fact - its built-in content blocker is plenty good enough for me, and so the only extension I’ve got installed is 1Password which seems to work just fine (once you change a couple of things). And you can install extensions without requiring a fucking account with anyone.

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The developer tools are as you would expect from a WebKit browser as well.

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Nice!

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I kind of wish Kagi made it more obvious that this is a thing they make. And that it’s free - the whole Orion+ thing is a bit confusing, but I’ve already signed up for it because as I stated in my last post, I am happy to pay money for a browser if it means no bullshit.

", "date_published": "2026-07-31T04:15:39Z"}, {"id": "/blog/2026/7/25/the-state-of-browsers-in-2026/", "url": "https://zerosleeps.com/blog/2026/7/25/the-state-of-browsers-in-2026/", "title": "The state of browsers in 2026", "content_html": "

I am dismayed with the state of dominant desktop web browsers at the moment, by which I mean the big 4: Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, and Apple’s Safari.

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I don’t know how or why serious people use Safari. It fits into macOS nicely and is scarily energy efficient compared to anything else, but way too many sites don’t work properly with it. It frequently just doesn’t do anything after sticking something in the URL/search bar and hitting enter, and it’s extension story is a joke. I can’t use it at my corporate job because of that last one since extensions can only be installed via Apple’s App Store, and that requires an Apple account.

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And look at what happened when I gave it a chance yesterday - within minutes it was painting content on top of it’s own tabs:

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Google Chrome is a great browser - everything works all the time. Is that because it’s better than everything else, or because it is by far the most used desktop browser? I suspect a bit of both - it certainly got to it’s market position because when it was new it really was so much better than anything else. But the “Google” part just doesn’t sit well with me. They’re an advertising company.

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Microsoft Edge is also excellent but let’s face it, it’s Chrome re-skinned and Microsoft are even creepier than Google. And desperate - the last time I looked at Edge it begged me to use Bing and Copilot and some shopping shit and coupon shit and and and. Ew.

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And then we get to Firefox. I don’t know how to express my feelings about my beloved Firefox. It just feels like it’s always a few steps behind everyone else. Always playing catch up. Constantly vying for everyone’s attention by trying flashy new things rather than concentrating on stuff that I care about, like bugs that are decades old and still have a status of “new”. There’s just always something about it that’s annoying me at any moment in time.

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Firefox is also humiliatingly inefficient on Apple silicone, especially when watching full-screen video. As in over 12 hours of battery life when using Safari versus 3 hours when using Firefox. I can’t help them with that.

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And look, Mozilla have to make money somehow but I would pay for a version of Firefox that doesn’t come with all the “sponsored” stuff. I’d pay even more if my money bought me one bug fix per year.

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I am encouraged by the number of “other” browser projects that are gaining traction, but I need something that gets out of the way and just works. The Opera’s and Orion’s aren’t there yet, for me anyway.

", "date_published": "2026-07-25T03:07:21Z"}, {"id": "/blog/2026/7/17/they-prefer-the-app/", "url": "https://zerosleeps.com/blog/2026/7/17/they-prefer-the-app/", "title": "They prefer the app", "content_html": "

Ibrahim Diallo:

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We prefer using websites, and we know most apps are oversized wrappers around a website. But I have to remember that the people with a thousand apps are not the minority. We are. We are the few who would rather use a progressive web app than download a 300 MB wrapper.

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", "date_published": "2026-07-17T02:28:36Z"}, {"id": "/blog/2026/6/27/if-you-cant-stand-by-a-feature-you-shouldnt-launch-it/", "url": "https://zerosleeps.com/blog/2026/6/27/if-you-cant-stand-by-a-feature-you-shouldnt-launch-it/", "title": "If you can\u2019t stand by a feature, you shouldn\u2019t launch it", "content_html": "

Good post by Marcin Wichary at Unsung, riffing on a segment of The Talk Show.

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This is one of the most baffling things about Apple software to me. For each application, or piece of an application, or component of their operating systems, why don’t they find one of their 150,000 employees who actually uses that piece of software every day, and give them ownership of it.

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About a quarter of the stuff I do in my day job is implementing fixes and tweaks that I or one of my developer colleagues have found. Not stuff that our customers have reported. And that is because we own our output and are embarrassed by bugs of all sizes.

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Software quality driven by pride. What’s wrong with that?

", "date_published": "2026-06-27T01:33:05Z"}, {"id": "/blog/2026/6/23/not-at-all-likely/", "url": "https://zerosleeps.com/blog/2026/6/23/not-at-all-likely/", "title": "Not at all likely", "content_html": "

I received this piece of dystopian literature in my inbox today from a company that manages some of our toll roads here in Australia:

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Our records indicate you have recently travelled through the Burnley Tunnel. If you have time, we\u2019d really appreciate your feedback on the on-road experience of this trip.

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Based on your recent trip, how likely are you to recommend travelling on the Burnley Tunnel to friends and family?

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How likely am I to recommend a highway? That goes through a tunnel? To my friends and family?

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Not very fucking likely, strangely enough.

", "date_published": "2026-06-23T08:46:05Z"}, {"id": "/blog/2026/6/18/why-i-email-complete-strangers/", "url": "https://zerosleeps.com/blog/2026/6/18/why-i-email-complete-strangers/", "title": "Why I email complete strangers", "content_html": "

Email is, and always has been, my preferred method of written communication for two reasons, both of which are topics of this post from Zachary Kai.

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The first is it’s openness, stability, and ubiquity:

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Social media platforms rise and fall like ancient empires sped up a thousand times. Yet email endures. Like the postal service or the printed book. Is it any coincidence these technologies remain my great loves? They share a quality I struggle to name. Perhaps it\u2019s permanence in an ephemeral world. You can tuck a letter in a drawer, discovering it decades later. A book can outlive its author by centuries. One can archive, search, and treasure an email. They\u2019re all vessels that honor my beloved words.

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And in their longevity is their flexibility. You can read a book anywhere, anytime. You can send a letter to the farthest-flung corners of the earth imaginable. And you can email anyone.

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The second is in it’s user interface:

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You can choose to engage with it in human time, and so can the recipient: compose when you have something to say, respond when you have space to think.

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", "date_published": "2026-06-18T07:32:11Z"}, {"id": "/blog/2026/6/17/if-you-are-asking-for-human-attention-demonstrate-human-effort/", "url": "https://zerosleeps.com/blog/2026/6/17/if-you-are-asking-for-human-attention-demonstrate-human-effort/", "title": "If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort", "content_html": "

This post by Tom Bedor has been doing the rounds over the last couple of weeks. It’s a proposition that you’d think would be common sense and part of basic human decency, but the fact that I’ve seen this post all over the place says something else.

", "date_published": "2026-06-17T01:18:18Z"}, {"id": "/blog/2026/5/30/iris/", "url": "https://zerosleeps.com/blog/2026/5/30/iris/", "title": "Iris", "content_html": "

Oh this is a magnificent new piece of software from Retina Studio.

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Apple Photos is just about the only Apple supplied “application” that I regularly use on macOS and it’s\u2026 fine. Certainly no better than fine. Iris is exactly, precisely, what I’ve always wanted Apple Photos to be.

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It took me 10 minutes of use to decide to move my photos from Photos to Iris. Yes Iris plays nicely with an existing Photos library, but nah I’ve actually moved everything out of Photos into the filesystem and into Iris exclusively.

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The decision would only have taken 5 minutes but for this: I’ve got decades of titles attached to stuff in my Photos library, as in, captions/titles that I have manually typed in. I thought about it and I’ve almost never gotten any value from that effort, so sod it, titles/captions no more. Between dates, times, locations, face matching, and the delightful machine-learning-powered tagging that Iris does, I don’t need titles.

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Some other charming features about Iris: it tells you what it’s doing. On first run it actually opens it’s little status window so you know what is going on. And if you wants to know more the documentation tells you. Imagine that! And the “Surprise Me!” menu option is so obvious and I frickin’ love it.

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And it costs the price of two coffees. No subscription. I’d have paid 5 times that, no questions asked.

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This is how software should be made.

", "date_published": "2026-05-30T05:11:38Z"}]}