zerosleeps

John Gruber at Daring Fireball following commentary on a few posts which have been doing the rounds about icons in macOS menu items:

It might sound hyperbolic but this change is the reason why I’ve decided not to upgrade to MacOS 26 Tahoe. I could put up with the rest of Liquid Glass’s half-baked who-thought-this-was-OK-to-ship? nonsense, but not the whole menu bar. I can tolerate being angry about UI changes Apple makes to the Mac. But I can’t tolerate being heartbroken.

You know things are bad if John Gruber hasn’t upgraded to Tahoe.

Bugs I’ve encountered in macOS Tahoe 26.2 so far this week:

AirDrop

Attempted to copy a file from one Mac to another. Both running Tahoe. Sending Mac found the receiving Mac without issue, but just said “waiting” when sending the file. The receiving Mac showed no signs that it had been asked to accept anything. Sending Mac eventually claimed the transfer was “declined”.

Liquid glass

Windows and dialogue boxes which use glass effects sometimes don’t show what’s behind them, and don’t refresh when stuff behind them changes. But screenshots of the issue show everything as expected! Difficult to explain in words, so here’s John Siracusa demonstrating the issue.

Phantom windows

Closing a window sometimes leaves behind a “phantom” window. This window isn’t visible, but if it’s on top of something you want to click on, it prevents the click from reaching the right thing. The videos attached to this Firefox bug report demonstrate it nicely.

Problems with AirDrop are exhausting because what’s the point of being in Apple’s ecosystem if shit like that doesn’t work? The other two aren’t major but they smell really bad. And this is the third release of macOS Tahoe.

It’s the 30th of December and I certainly ain’t going to be completing any other books over the next two days, so here are the stats for 2025:

I completed 19 books (same as in 2024, coincidentally) and abandoned another one book. The average rating of completed books was 3.6, which is higher than usual. But I did re-read four 5-starrers.

I discovered one new 5-star book as well: “You Called An Ambulance For What?” by Tim Booth.

The Eclectic Light Company:

Over the last few weeks I’ve been discovering problems that have been eroding confidence in macOS. From text files that simply won’t show up in Spotlight search, to Clock timers that are blank and don’t function, there’s one common feature: macOS encounters an error or fault, but doesn’t report that to the user, instead just burying it deep in the log.

This was a huge component of my 3-month long moan about macOS.

So after my attempt to defend The Bureau of Meteorology‘s new website, we’re being told that it cost $96.5 million.

An experienced, competent, efficient consultant in my industry bills at about $1,000 per day. Let’s be equally generous by assuming one of those consultants works 250 days per year. That means this thing took 386 overpaid-overworked-consultant-years?

That can’t be right.