Breathing clean air depends on filters that do more than trap particles—they must hold them. In many conventional systems, captured dust can loosen under airflow and mechanical disturbances, which lowers filtration efficiency, shortens service life, and forces more frequent replacement. The bottleneck is not capture alone, but durable retention of what the filter catches.

A research team led by Professor Sanghyuk Wooh and Professor Chae Bin Kim has introduced a dynamic imine bond adhesive (DIBA) designed to keep airborne particles embedded. The concept is to marry solid-like stability with liquid-like adhesion, so the filter surface can “refresh” itself while working.

The coating is built by crosslinking polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) via dynamic Schiff base chemistry. This chemistry enables bond exchange at the interface, allowing adhesive sites to reorganize over time rather than degrade into inert residue. The result is a coating that is both mechanically robust and chemically active.

When sprayed onto commercially available filter media, the DIBA layer behaves like an internal reservoir of stickiness. As particles are collected, they are drawn into the adhesive film rather than remaining only on the exterior fibers. Capillary-driven wetting then forms adhesive bridges around individual particulates, increasing the real contact area that governs holding strength.

Performance tests combined chemical, mechanical, and interfacial characterization—rheology, FTIR, atomic force microscopy, and microscopy—with filtration trials. The coating boosted particle adhesion dramatically, approaching a nearly seventy-fold improvement compared with typical behavior. Importantly, the adhesive renewal process helps counteract the gradual loss of attachment that plagues standard filters.

Filtration efficiency improved by roughly 10–30% across multiple commercial materials, without raising pressure drop. The upgrade is significant in practical terms: one reported shift is from MERV 6 toward MERV 11, indicating better capture at the same airflow penalty.

The coated filters also sustained operation under high-speed airflow (up to 20 m/s) and delayed pore clogging. By maintaining effective particulate capture for longer intervals, the DIBA approach extended filter lifespan by nearly a factor of two relative to conventional designs.

Because DIBA is applied through simple spray-coating, it is compatible with existing manufacturing and retrofit workflows. The researchers highlight applications ranging from HVAC and air purifiers to cleanrooms, industrial dust collectors, automotive cabin filters, and personal protective equipment.

More broadly, the work suggests a platform for next-generation filtration where energy use and replacement schedules improve simultaneously. The dynamic adhesive strategy could be adapted to other separations, including water purification and environmental remediation, wherever particles need to be captured and kept immobilized.

Subject of Research: Not applicable
Article Title: A Super-Adhesive Air Filter With Capillarity-Mediated Spontaneous Particle Absorption via Dynamic Bond Exchange
News Publication Date: 22-Apr-2026
Web References: https://doi.org/10.1002/adma.202600006
References: DOI: 10.1002/adma.202600006
Image Credits: Professor Sanghyuk Wooh from Chung-Ang University, Republic of Korea and Professor Chae Bin Kim from Pusan National University, Republic of Korea

Keywords

Air filtration, dynamic adhesive chemistry, Schiff base, PDMS, particle retention, capillarity, MERV, particulate matter, surface engineering, polymers

O app de leitura Instapaper foi atualizado hoje para a sua versão 10.0 com uma série de novidades — incluindo uma interface repaginada e adaptada ao Liquid Glass (e outras mudanças de design em grande parte do app), bem como novos recursos e melhorias de desempenho.

O Menu de Seções, por exemplo, agora pode mostrar as Contagens de seção em todos os lugares, bem como permite ordenar pastas e etiquetas por nome, ordem de adição ou contagem. Também há melhorias na exibição e suporte completo ao Liquid Glass no iPad.

Quando falamos na Lista de Artigos, ela foi redesenhada com um novo modo Condensado, opções de tipografia e uma nova ação de deslize para mover artigos para o topo. Ela também cria automaticamente listas de reprodução a partir da lista de artigos completa.

Por fim, o Leitor agora conta com quatro novas fontes de leitura (Literata, New York, Open Sans e Atkinson Hyperlegible), bem como permite escolher o que é aberto ao se tocar em um artigo (a Vista de Artigo, a Vista Web, o navegador integrado ou o padrão).

Também contando agora com um widget para ver os artigos lidos no momento ou os salvos recentemente, o Instapaper é grátis para baixar na App Store, mas para usá-lo por completo é necessária uma assinatura Premium, que sai por R$10/mês ou R$100/ano.

A brasileira Sofia Coelho, que atualmente ocupa o cargo de diretora de arte na Apple, ofereceu um raro vislumbre dos bastidores do processo criativo da empresa em uma publicação no LinkedIn, na qual revelou rascunhos e um protótipo do personagem Lil’ Finder Guy.

Embora a publicação tenha sido removida (por qualquer motivo que seja), as imagens mostram como o personagem saiu do papel para as peças publicitárias da Maçã. O Lil’ Finder Guy, não custa lembrar, estreou como o rosto da campanha do MacBook Neo e, posteriormente, também apareceu em comerciais que divulgavam recursos do Mac.

Coelho disse que a publicação era um “anúncio de aniversário bem-humorado” e descreveu a liderança do projeto como um “projeto de design dos sonhos”. Também mencionou os colegas que trabalharam ao seu lado na campanha.

Uma imagem mostrava uma folha de esboços explorando as expressões, as proporções e a forma geral do personagem. Essas imagens estavam ao lado do que parecia ser um protótipo físico do próprio Lil’ Finder Guy — o qual tinha “exatamente a altura de uma maçã”, segundo Coelho.

Ela também observou que a campanha figurou na lista de finalistas do Cannes Lions, uma das premiações mais prestigiadas da publicidade.

Além de rara, os detalhes de bastidores mostram que até mesmo as menores ideias da Apple recebem um tratamento criativo completo.

On July 24, 2006, the world got its first glimpse of Apple's new wireless Mighty Mouse due to an FCC filing. It became an instant winner.

(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

Após um período em desenvolvimento, o WhatsApp começou a liberar um novo design para as bolhas de mensagens para testadores e alguns usuários da versão estável do seu aplicativo para iOS.

Como mostra a comparação abaixo, divulgada pelo WABetaInfo, as bolhas agora contam com cantos mais arredondados em relação à interface anterior — o que dá a elas uma aparência bem mais moderna.

Outra mudança pode ser vista especialmente nas mensagens de mídia trocadas em chats individuais, que deixaram de ter uma borda em volta de seu conteúdo e apresentam exclusivamente a foto ou o vídeo em questão.

Mensagens de mídia encaminhadas ou enviadas em grupo ainda mostram uma borda exclusivamente na parte superior — com o rótulo de encaminhamento ou a identificação de quem as enviou, respectivamente.

Links enviados com pré-visualização, por sua vez, apresentam a borda apenas na parte inferior, para abrigar o indicador de envio/recebimento/leitura.

Apesar de bem simples, essa será mais uma mudança que dará uma maior modernização à interface do app — especialmente nas bolhas das mensagens, que mantêm o mesmo estilo há muito tempo.

O Opera One para desktop é o mais novo navegador a aderir ao modo de abas verticais. A novidade, que é opcional, foi anunciada hoje pela Opera em seu blog oficial e funcionará de forma semelhante à que ficou popular em outros softwares — como o falecido Arc Browser.

A Opera coloca como grande vantagem o fato de que os usuários podem visualizar mais facilmente o nome das abas quando elas estão num formato vertical se muitas delas estiverem abertas. No formato tradicional, apenas o favicon fica visível — o que dificulta a identificação.

Esse modo também adiciona mais espaço vertical para a navegação em sites, já que apenas a barra de endereços fica visível na parte superior. Na vertical, embora a maioria dos sites já deixem muito espaço vazio nas laterais, é possível escondê-las quando necessário.

O funcionamento das abas na vertical é bastante intuitivo e semelhante as abas horizontais tradicionais. Inclusive, as ilhas de guias também estão disponíveis no novo formato com a maioria de suas funcionalidades — e são preservadas quando o modo de abas é alterado.

Para ativar as abas verticais no Opera One, basta clicar com o botão direito em qualquer local na barra de abas e selecionar a opção correspondente — e o mesmo pode ser feito para reverter a alteração. A opção também está disponível no botão de configuração rápida.

Além dessa novidade, o Opera One também ganhou uma integração com o Google Lens, que agora está disponível diretamente de sua barra de pesquisa — tal qual já ocorre no Google Chrome.

Malcolm Crawford (Mastodon):

The open-plan floors make it hard to concentrate. The building is so large that getting from one meeting to the next eats real time out of the day. It’s common for people to run meetings with colleagues over Webex — colleagues on the same campus, sometimes no more than two hundred yards away.

Ironically, Apple Park replaced a campus that did far better on the same measure without ever trying to. Infinite Loop produced far more of the accidental, cross-team contact Apple Park was explicitly built to create. Working out why starts with what Infinite Loop got right by accident. It continues with what the research on office proximity says about why that kind of thing happens at all. And it ends with what Apple Park could become instead — including a version of the fix Apple already trusts enough to run for a hundred people a year.

[…]

There’s no obvious focal point for the whole site — most sections have their own sitting area and their own coffee bar, but nothing plays the role Caffè Macs and the IL1 coffee bar played together at Infinite Loop. Caffè Macs at Apple Park seats a thousand people and feels built for throughput, not conversation. Everything is organised per-segment rather than around a shared centre, which is convenient for the people in that segment and useless for the discovery-by-accident that made the old campus work.

[…]

By multiple accounts from people who were there during design and construction, the site was flagged as under-provisioned for meetings and conferences before it even opened.

Via Jason Anthony Guy:

Apple Park is a beautiful structure, but is not terribly conducive to focused or collaborative work. Even as an occasional visitor I found it overwhelming. Employees sit shoulder to shoulder, voices bounce off and bleed through glass walls, and privacy is a virtual impossibility. My friends and colleagues who worked there regularly found it difficult to be productive.

I worked in Infinite Loop (Building 3, 2nd floor) for thirteen years (right below Developer Publications, where Malcolm spent a good portion of his Apple career). I loved IL because its design made serendipitous encounters easy. Whether it was sitting outside Caffè Macs or in the IL 1 Atrium, I would inevitably bump into someone and have a conversation that furthered an in-flight project, sparked something new, or simply reinforced the social ties that bind colleagues.

It helped that at that time, Apple had perhaps 10,000 employees, most of whom were in or near IL. After iPhone came about and IL started getting locked down, much of the natural collaboration dissipated, disappearing behind badged doors and disclosures.

Ken McLeod:

IL provided a place to focus on your work[1], as well as seating spaces that are out of the flow of traffic where you can have an informal meeting[2]. At AP, every collaborative space is effectively in the middle of a hallway. That turns out to be enormously distracting, both to you and to those people trying to work in the glass bullpen right next to it.

[1] before all cubicles and offices became multi-person shared spaces

[2] before all those spaces were filled in with more offices

Helge Heß:

“The IL1 atrium really was the crossroads of the company in those days” I really don’t think that this is true literally by any means. Assuming “those days” overlap with the time I’ve been there (pre Park). The XFs in IL have been extremely scarce. IL was way too small and overloaded, I’d actually say it was very similar to Apple Park. No one really wanted to work there in those tiny offices with multiple people 🤷‍♀️

Steve Hayman:

I loved the IL1 atrium. I’d sit there and hope that someone like MMalc would wander by, and they often did. It was a real destination for field people who didn’t get to visit the mothership very often. I miss that. AP had nothing like it.

Eric Schwarz:

I think of my days in college—most dorms residence halls were not air conditioned, so at the end of August, you had to open your window (often to place a box fan) and door to create some airflow. People walking through the building would meet by chance. Newer buildings tended to be less lively and more like a hotel—all the doors closed and rarely much activity. Through renovations, most of the buildings have had air conditioning added, dropping those interactions over the years.

Previously:

• Apple and Design Details
• Apple Park’s Open Work Spaces
• Apple’s New Campus

Update (2026-07-22): Dr. Drang:

As you may know, the Lumon Industries building that Mark, Helly, Irving, and Dylan work in is a former Bell Labs facility in Holmdel, New Jersey. I first learned about the building several years ago, when I read Jon Gertner’s excellent history of The Labs, The Idea Factory. It’s a distinctive place designed by Eero Saarinen in the early 60s.

Bell Labs was known for the fruitful collaboration of its researchers, often started through chance meetings in the hallways of other Bell Labs facilities. The new Holmdel building was supposed to further that sort of teamwork, but things didn’t work out as planned.

macintog:

I worked in IL1 for over a decade. The day I saw the open-plan spaceship, I knew I would never set foot inside. There are more rewarding ways to work in a barn.

Paul Kafasis:

With last year’s release of MacOS 26 (Tahoe), Apple made a mess of app icons. In the first betas of MacOS 27 (Golden Gate), however, there are signs of a turnaround. We’re urging Apple to continue making improvements, by restoring the ability for MacOS app icons to have distinct shapes.

[…]

After decades of beautiful, memorable Mac icons in varying shapes, Tahoe flattened personality to obtain bland uniformity. The platform is worse for it.

Past icons weren’t just more expressive. They were also more usable. Having distinct shapes provided a useful way to tell icons apart. Tahoe eliminates that cue by forcing everything into the same squircle, leaving color as the primary way to tell icons apart at a glance.

Jason Snell:

Kafasis makes the important point that uniform shapes make it more difficult for users, especially those with vision issues including color deficiency, to differentiate between icons.

John Siracusa:

Squircle Jail is the worst design-related thing Apple has ever done to Mac developers, and probably the worst icon-related thing it has ever done, period. Incredibly developer-hostile.

If squircled icons are actually better, then let that design win in the market. That’s how we transitioned from the classic Mac OS icon style to the more photorealistic Mac OS X icon style. Developers adopted it because they wanted to, and because users desired it.

John Gruber (Mastodon):

The squircles, I will point out, are not in and of themselves the problem. The problem would be the same with any mandated shape, like, e.g., VisionOS’s circles.

[…]

I can’t think of any other design crime Apple has ever foisted on Mac developers that I’d argue (with Siracusa) was worse.

[…]

It’s like Apple decided every single one of its own apps must wear a stupid-looking hat, and they put those stupid-looking hats on third-party apps too, whether the developers of those apps want them or not. Scratch that. Not hats but helmets.

[…]

Just the mere silhouette of the old Keynote icon is more recognizable, and thus more iconic, than any icon on any platform from Apple today.

Jeff Johnson:

The traffic sign analogy hits me personally, because the StopTheMadness icon used to be shaped like a stop sign, but I was practically forced into making it a generic road sign.

Gus Mueller:

I get why Apple did it, but I think it’s completely wrong for the Mac.

Marcin Wichary:

On his blog, Jim Nielsen writes how Apple filed away so much expression by forcing rigid icon bureaucracy in macOS. Nielsen focuses mostly on distinctiveness; previously, you could make the icon unique by its general shape or the shape of its contents, but one of these two levers has now been taken away[…]

[…]

However, one also can’t help but notice how ugly and amateurish the Creator Studio icons are, so it all feels absolutely like a net negative – the new system took something away and the proposed replacement feels low quality[…]

Rui Carmo:

I, too, find the squircles aesthetically offensive and utterly pointless.

[…]

The part that genuinely breaks my brain, though, is that I now find icons on Linux more distinctive than on macOS, which would be impossible for my ten-year-ago self to believe. The platform that built its reputation on craft and visual identity has spent a year sanding it off, while the one everyone used to mock for its inconsistency is where individuality survives.

Jeff Johnson:

The subliminal, Orwellian message of the squircle jail is that all software is subservient to Apple, merely accessories to Apple devices, interchangeable cogs in the machine.

Mario Guzmán:

Had to grab the rest of the icons from #MacOSX Leopard. Gosh, they’re so, so pretty. So finely crafted. Gorgeous. Love it.

Dr. Drang:

I agree, but Apple’s 50th anniversary has gotten me thinking a lot lately about the early days of the Mac, so it’s only natural that my mind shifted to the highly constrained icons Mac applications had back then.

[…]

Many of the complaints about squircle jail are about the loss of icon elements that “stick out” from the rest of the design. As you can see, this idea was there from the very start; the hands stick out from the tilted rectangles.

John Gruber:

I never loved the hand on these icons. It felt too uniform. It functioned like a “this is an application” badge, but such a badge never felt necessary to me.

[…]

I think it’s less that Apple gave up on them and more that it came into focus that the “hand holding a pen over a diamond-shaped document” convention was intended for document-based apps. It signified “This is a creative tool that you use to create documents”. Apps that weren’t about creating document files — like Disk First Aid and Font/DA Mover — got different icons. Font/DA Mover’s truck icon in System 2 signified that you use this tool to move things. Disk First Aid’s ambulance was an obvious metaphor for repairing something unwell.

[…]

But the main thing about the “hand holding pen over diamond” convention was that it was only ever a convention.

John Gruber (Mastodon):

(a) I don’t think this is a good mandate for iOS either;

(b) it was always so for iOS, though, so it’s not like Apple has ever taken away rich creative icon shapes on the platform;

(c) MacOS is a far richer and more precise environment than iOS.

[…]

App icons on the iOS home screen are effectively simple buttons. I think it’s rather obvious that’s why they have had that squircle/roundsquare shape ever since the iPhone was announced in January 2007 (source). They’re one-tap launchers. App icons in MacOS are not mere buttons. You can drag them, move them, and drop things on them. You click them to select, and double-click to launch. They are richer objects that deserve a richer visual vocabulary. iOS is a world meant for fat-tipped Magic Markers and blunt safety scissors. MacOS is a world meant to support fine-tipped drafting pens and precision razor-sharp X-ACTO knives.

Louie Mantia (Mastodon):

While developers have submitted full-bleed square images for iOS app icons since 2008, for these new squircle icons in macOS 11, Apple provided a template to compose app icons in an image editing tool like Photoshop, with full control over the canvas beyond the suggested—but not required—squircle. This template made it easy-ish for designers to compose macOS app icons that were identical to or synonymous with an iOS app icon, while leaving the door open to continue using arbitrarily-shaped app icons on macOS.

[…]

The second type of Squircle Jail is more controversial, because these app icons were specifically drawn with the intention of fitting in. Overriding that intention feels like punishment for having done the right thing. App icons in a style that was recently encouraged by the system are now scaled down and put inside the squircle as if it were a container. Every icon that was utilizing the previous squircle shape suddenly looks much worse than before.

[…]

Instead of taking care to design and develop solutions specifically for Mac and iPhone, newer and bigger companies that don’t only make apps often ship apps with logo icons, rather than app icons. We’ve all seen it.

[…]

I would love if Apple provided a way for designers to poke outside that squircle boundary. Some of my favorite app icons did that. But also some of my least-favorite app icons ignored this shape entirely, when it was used for every system icon in the last five years. Whenever those apps showed up in my Dock, it was like a stain on my shirt I couldn’t get out.

John Gruber:

Ultimately this is what I object to with the squircle mandate. It favors the bottom of the heap by restricting the top. It makes bad icons mediocre but pushes great icons toward mediocrity too. That’s not The Macintosh Way.

Nick Heer:

Mantia touches on all the pragmatic reasons to unify the shape of icons in an operating system, all of which I have considered, and then drops the above paragraphs — and things started to make more sense to me. This is a different way to think about it. This is not a situation where a cleaner looks like a zesty beverage with toxic consequences. The shared general function of these icons does help communicate something and makes them less ambiguous in that sense.

But a broad category of functionality is only part of the story of an icon and — with respect to Mantia’s long and illustrious history of work in this area, and that of co-Parakeeter Luka Grafera — taking away a difference of shape also limits what an icon can communicate. It may not be a cleaning product that looks and is packaged like juice, but imagine if every consumable liquid was in identical bottles with only a different label.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

Louie’s squircle jail post just underscores that the squircle jail benefits 99% of apps, and is better for the platform overall. There is only ever a handful of apps that make great Mac app icons, and a withering number of ‘great Mac app icon designers’ — you can probably only name one or two left in the scene.

Jeff Johnson:

Mantia talks as if it were more important for apps to “belong to the Dock” than to allow Dock users to quickly select the right app in the list. That’s choosing form over functionality.

“The shape of apps is a squircle.” But Mac users already knew those were apps in the Dock!

See also: Accidental Tech Podcast.

Tyler Hall:

If you’re lucky enough to distribute an app outside the Mac App Store, you can break free of squircle jail using NSDockTilePlugIn. It’s not strictly the intended use-case of that API. And it’s not allowed in the Mac App Store, either. But it can solve the problem.

BasicAppleGuy:

If you recognize these icons, it’s probably time to schedule your routine back exam.

Previously:

• Clear and Tinted Icons Are a Hard Pass
• Liquid Glass 27 Icons
• Apple Creator Studio Icons
• Tahoe’s Terrible Icons
• One Size Does Not Fit All
• macOS Tahoe 26 Developer Beta 4
• macOS Tahoe’s New Theming System
• macOS Tahoe 26 Announced
• The macOS App Icon Book

Update (2026-07-17): Louie Mantia:

But my perspective right now is to be very pragmatic. The decision to mask all icons with squircles is a long-time coming. It was perhaps the most predictable thing to happen in Apple’s history. For 20 years, it’s been leading up to this.

I want to make nice things for macOS, whatever macOS is. And this is what it is.

Roger Wong:

Some of my favorite icons over the years have had interesting shapes, like the truck for Transmit, the vise for Compressor, or the cute bird for Twitteriffic.

[…]

But I also recall clicking some icons and not being able to select them. Why? Because I was inaccurate in my click and instead my cursor landed in the empty space just outside the shape.

[…]

If I recall correctly, developers could use a different mask for the click target to help users out. But I don’t think many did all the time, including Apple, which you can obviously see in the video above.

Louie Mantia:

I don’t want to step on toes regarding your new [StopTheMadness] icon which has great color— but I don’t understand why you elected to abandon the octagon as the outer shape. That’s a choice. You are not forced to abandon it. Why not do something like this?

I like this.

Nick Heer:

Losing some of the artistry in an icon makes it more difficult to distinguish between legitimate and well-crafted Mac apps, and everything else. It is not a perfect proxy, to be sure, and there are some very nice squircle icons. But it is nevertheless a unfortunate change that makes apps of varying levels of quality look more similar.

Adam Engst:

Of the TidBITS readers who chose to respond to the poll, only 1% said they use clear icons on the Mac, and no one admitted to using tinted icons. On the iPhone, clear icons were twice as popular—a whopping 2%—and just 1% of respondents said they use tinted icons. Dark icons, which retain color, were slightly more popular, but still couldn’t exceed single digits, with 6% on the Mac and 9% on the iPhone.

Squircle Jail is one thing; redesigning icons to be assembled within Icon Composer is another. The latter makes a lot less sense but for supporting clear and tinted icons.

Previously:

• Golden Gate Squircle Jail
• Icon Composer Notes
• macOS Tahoe’s New Theming System

SpamSieve 3.3.1 is an update of my Mac e-mail spam filter that improves the filtering accuracy and includes various optimizations, fixes, and updates for macOS 27. Some interesting engineering issues were:

• I’m still supporting macOS 10.13, but the app can now build with the macOS 12 deployment target in preparation for Xcode 27. The way Swift handles calling deprecated APIs remains annoying. You need workarounds like protocols to suppress a warning in a particular region of code. Often, I am updating to a newer API, but I want to continue using the old one on earlier versions of macOS. Right now I am heavily testing on macOS 26, so I would like to only deploy the new code there. Sometimes the initial versions of APIs are buggy, and I don’t want to have to retest every feature on every version. But Swift doesn’t like me to gate the calls to macOS 26 and later if the new API was actually introduced in, say, macOS 11.

• The most risky update was probably switching to the Swift API for Scanner. This is tricky because the current scan position changes from being based on UTF-16 indexes to String.Index. And in some cases my code was intentionally scanning into the middle of a combining character. I was really glad to have extensive tests here.

• Recent versions of Tahoe introduced a Core Data bug that broke save recovery (when invalid Unicode can’t be written to the database and we have to fix it up first). When the error comes in, SpamSieve looks under the NSDetailedErrorsKey key, but the value of this key is "NSDetailedErrorsKey" while the actual error info is under the key "NSDetailedErrors".

• Database corruption combined with a Core Data bug and two Swift behaviors were causing crashes. The root problem, I think, is that in this situation Core Data neglects to set the error pointer for -[NSManagedObjectContext countForFetchRequest:error:]. Normally, Swift would detect this and throw a generic nilError. However, this method signals errors by returning NSNotFound instead of nil. It’s annotated as swift_error(nonnull_error), which I think means that Swift doesn’t even look at the return value, only the (unset) error. So my code was receiving NSNotFound on the non-error path, treating it as a real count, and doing some math with it, which (by default in Swift) leads to a crash if there’s overflow. Now my code checks for NSNotFound and uses Int.addingReportingOverflow().

• I reimplemented Core Data batch fetching because of two problems with the fetchBatchSize option. First, it logs spurious errors when fetching from multiple stores at once. Second, it leads to high memory use. It will load objects in batches, but it never releases the earlier batches. You can manually refault objects that you no longer need, but it will still hold onto the full object shells, which can add up. My implementation only holds onto IDs, and it can fetch the IDs using a different context than the objects to push more work to background threads.

• I’m now using String.makeContiguousUTF8() in various places to avoid slow iteration of bridged strings.

• There was a regression where some menu code could crash on macOS 10.13. -[NSMenu setItemArray:] is only available on macOS 10.14 and later, whereas the getter is always available. With old Objective-C, the two methods could be annotated with separate availabilities. The Objective-C property syntax doesn’t allow this, so there’s no way for the compiler to flag calls where the setter is missing.

• The AppleScript support works much better with large data sets. The key, I think, is to never return an array to Cocoa for a scripting property/element. First, if you give it a lazy array it will sometimes try to access all the elements even if it only needs a few. And, second, AppleScript will run out of memory if the array is too large. By using indexed accessors, you can maintain laziness and only convert one object to a descriptor at a time. By caching a batch-fetching collection, you can limit the number of fetches and respond quickly when AppleScript requests individual objects.

Previously:

• Xcode 27 Announced
• SpamSieve 3.3
• Swift Proposal: Precise Control Flags Over Compiler Warnings
• Swift at 10

Juli Clover:

Apple today released the first public beta of macOS Golden Gate, expanding the macOS 27 beta test to non-developers. You can sign up to test the update on Apple’s beta website, and then download it by going to System Settings > General > Software Update and toggling on the macOS 27 beta.

Jason Snell:

The fact that there are more design changes in macOS than any of Apple’s other 27 updates speaks volumes about how broken many of the Tahoe design decisions were. Apple describes the design as “even more refined,” because in Apple marketing-speak, broken features are never remedied or fixed—past features are just improved. The truth is, Apple has rolled back numerous missteps and made changes to others to mitigate the issues they caused.

Antonio G. Di Benedetto:

The Golden Gate developer beta has proven stable in my everyday use on an M5 MacBook Air and M5 Max MacBook Pro, which is notable since dev betas often have side effects like tanking battery life or causing hardware to run hotter than normal.

[…]

Would I still prefer to go back to the flatter design of macOS Sequoia? Yes, unequivocally. But at least Liquid Glass is more tolerable and less distracting now.

John Voorhees:

Nowhere is the Snow Leopard of it all more apparent than in the hundreds of little changes made to improve the day-to-day use of your Mac. I’m not going to catalog them all here, but I’ve used Golden Gate on two different Macs at this point, and based on my experiences so far, the changes are meaningful.

Jeff Johnson:

This is the crazy Finder column view file selection dragging behavior I’m seeing in the latest Golden Gate developer beta.

Matthias Gansrigler-Hrad:

With the release of the macOS 27 Golden Gate public beta, can we finally submit Mac apps built with Xcode 27?

Previously:

• Golden Gate Spotlight
• Apple Intelligence in appleOS 27
• macOS Touch
• AI-Generated Shortcuts
• Siri AI Announced
• Glow Leopard
• macOS 27 Golden Gate Announced
• Liquid Glass 27 Slider
• Liquid Glass 27 Icons
• Golden Gate Window Corners
• Golden Gate Sidebars and Toolbars
• Golden Gate Menu Icons
• appleOS 26 Public Betas

Juli Clover:

Apple released the iOS 27 public beta today, and if you’ve been curious about the new software, now’s the time to try it out. iOS 27 brings Siri AI, performance improvements, and lots of new Apple Intelligence features.

[…]

Everything feels snappier than it did in iOS 26. Animations are quicker, apps launch faster, and AirDrop transfers complete faster. You’ll see improvements when taking photos, opening the keyboard, using the App Library, and swapping Home Screen pages. Your iMessages between devices sync more accurately, messages won’t fail to send and will be automatically retried, and your iPhone can transition more smoothly between Wi-Fi and cellular.

Dan Moren:

In general, the iOS 27 incarnation of Liquid Glass is far easier on the eyes, dialing down the transparency in favor of legibility. Apple’s also imposed some distinction between user interface elements and content. For example, in list views like in Messages and Mail there are now much clearer “toolbar” areas at the top when you start scrolling, even if they still have some degree of translucency. App icons have also gotten a face lift; they’re sharper, and feel more vibrant.

[…]

That’s because one of the odd things about looking at iOS 27 is that there’s just a ton of small stuff—those “quality of life” improvements that chip away at little frustrations and annoyances.

Previously:

• Apple Intelligence in appleOS 27
• Siri AI Announced
• Glow Leopard
• Liquid Glass 27 Slider
• iOS 27 Announced
• appleOS 26 Public Betas

Rizki Kelimutu:

Firefox is evolving with a refreshed design that makes the browser feel more modern, approachable, and consistent across desktop and mobile. The refresh also extends to Firefox’s voice and writing style, making product experience feel more human, direct, and unmistakably Firefox.

Via Jeff Johnson:

Nothing says “consistent” like making your large-screen keyboard & mouse UI exactly like your tiny touchscreen UI.

And nothing says “more human” like a manufactured voice and writing style.

rjacob:

Internally, we’ve been calling this work Project Nova, and today we’re excited to share a deeper look at what we’ve been building and where we’re heading next.

The goal of this work is to create a more cohesive foundation for Firefox: making the browser feel cleaner, warmer, faster, and more adaptable.

Some of the areas we’re working on include:

• Simpler navigation and a redesigned Settings experience
• Easier access to features like tab groups, split view, and vertical tabs
• The return of Compact Mode
• Refreshed visual updates across tabs, icons, spacing, and browser surfaces
• More customization options, including new themes and wallpapers

Previously:

• New Mozilla CEO
• Mozilla Changes Firefox Terms of Use
• Firefox at 20
• The Negative Impact of Mobile-First Web Design on Desktop

Update (2026-07-28): athomas (via Thomas Clement):

Starting today, you can try out the next design evolution of Firefox in Nightly.

It’s still Firefox, now with a more cohesive look and feel across tabs, menus, panels, and other browser surfaces. You’ll notice softer tab shapes, a warmer color palette, updated icons, and – after hearing from many of you – the return of Compact Mode and new theme options to make Firefox your own.

Still no AppleScript support.

Update (2026-08-04): Marcin Wichary:

Contra the previous post, just spotted this “Same settings, new look!” callout in Firefox, on a page I have never visited before, talking about a feature I have never used[…]

Marcin Wichary:

But I also want to show things that Finder does well, and this might be something no one does nearly as thoughtfully: text truncation.

[…]

Finder position the tooltip exactly atop the existing text. I think this is really clever: it avoids overlapping other useful information, and makes it faster to reorient yourself.

[…]

Lastly, Finder only shows the tooltip when it’s needed.

Previously:

• Tahoe Broke Resizing Finder Column View

Basic Apple Guy:

But what exactly is a Mavericks? Where is Sonoma? And how many Mac users could point to where Ventura or Tahoe on a map?

I decided to trace the history and real-world locations behind every California-inspired macOS release and the wallpapers used to market the them to the world. Enjoy.

Previously:

• macOS 27 Golden Gate Announced
• Default macOS Wallpapers
• Mac and iOS Wallpaper Archive

Raymond Chen:

Tony Krueger is remembered in Wikipedia as the person who ported the game Chip’s Challenge to Windows for the Windows Entertainment Pack. But that’s probably not the code he wrote that touched the most people.

Tony worked on Word 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, then on Word for OS/2 and Word for Mac, then returned to Word 6.0 and several versions beyond that. He probably holds the record for “most versions of Word shipped.”

[…]

Tony made the spell checker much more unobtrusive so that it didn’t interfere with your foreground work. And when it found a problem, instead of waiting for you to trigger a spell check, it immediately drew red squiggles under potentially-misspelled words (and later green squiggles under potential grammatical errors).

Update (2026-06-30): See also: Marcin Wichary and Jon Snader.

Swift 6.4 is now available in beta form with Xcode 27. The Swift Evolution proposals are listed here.

What’s new in Swift:

Discover the latest language advancements, including updates for everyday ergonomics, improved concurrency, and safer high-performance code. Explore workflow and language interoperability improvements and updates in embedded Swift.

Build real-time apps and services with gRPC and Swift:

Build engaging live experiences with gRPC in your Swift app and backend. gRPC is an open-source RPC framework designed for high-performance, bidirectional streaming APIs. Explore how the gRPC Swift package provides a modern, safe runtime built with Swift concurrency.

Explore numerical computing in Swift with MLX:

Bring NumPy-style computing natively to Swift with MLX Swift. Discover how to eliminate cross-language friction in your machine learning workflows by handling image processing, tensor operations, and neural network training in a single, type-safe environment. Explore the APIs that let you leverage GPU acceleration while enjoying the compiler, tooling, and debugging experience you already know.

Swift Group Lab:

Join us online for a deep dive into WWDC26 with Apple engineers and designers to ask questions, get advice, and follow the discussion about the week’s biggest Swift announcements.

Matt Massicotte:

There’s a voting system. And that means a number of questions weren’t selected. This time I copied those down and I thought it could be fun to take a shot at answering the ones that are more in my area.

Xcode 27 Beta 2 Release Notes:

The Swift dependency scanner has been optimized to avoid redundant setup work and header searches when looking up Clang modules during a single dependency-scan action, substantially improving scanning performance.

As a consequence of this change, every Clang module reachable from a single Swift dependency-scan action must have a unique module name. If two module maps visible to the same scan declare a Clang module with the same name, the scan may report an error.

[…]

System now provides Swift APIs for the C stat, lstat, fstat, and fstatat system calls. This includes a new Stat type with initializers from FilePath, FileDescriptor, or a C string; FilePath.stat() and FileDescriptor.stat() instance methods; and supporting types (FileType, FileMode, FileFlags, UserID, GroupID, DeviceID, and Inode).

Wade Tregaskis:

The final piece of the Prospective Vision for Accessors, this allows for more efficient accessors on structs, in a nutshell.

[…]

Now there’s a safer version of the existing withUnsafeTemporaryAllocation (first introduced in Swift 5.6). It works just like you’d expect. It comes in both “raw bytes” and typed elements versions, just like its unsafe predecessor.

[…]

The new isTriviallyIdentical(to:) method offers a guaranteed-fast way to check two objects for equality. It is essentially an optimised version of the existing equality condition provided by Equatable and the == operator. It’s useful because it guarantees O(1) time complexity, whereas == makes no formal guarantees at all (and for many types is O(N) or worse). But unlike the existing identity comparison operator === – also O(1) – it promises to do more than just tell if two objects are the exact same pointer, and it works on value types (not just reference types).

[…]

These new types generalise the existing patterns of borrowed and mutable references, that have previously existed in Swift in much more restricted forms (e.g. inout parameters are essentially MutableRef parameters, and Span & MutableSpan are array equivalents).

There’s now a built-in function for demangling Swift symbol names, in the Runtime module (that’s bundled with the Swift toolchain, alongside the stdlib etc).

Khoa Pham:

As Apple has aligned OS version numbers across platforms, Swift 6.4 takes the next step by letting you collapse repetitive availability attributes into a single anyAppleOS token.

[…]

There are situations where you need to call a deprecated API while you plan a migration, or audit a critical function for unsafe usage, without letting those concerns bleed into the rest of the project. The new @diagnose attribute handles both cases.

[…]

Some work should complete even after a task is cancelled, like flushing a file to avoid corruption. withTaskCancellationShield wraps a region where Task.isCancelled always returns false.

Antoine van der Lee:

Swift 6.4 implements SE-0493: Support async calls in defer bodies. This is one of those changes that feels obvious once you need it.

[…]

Swift 6.4 improves error handling for unstructured tasks through SE-0520: Discardable result use in Task initializers. The change helps you catch a subtle bug: creating a throwing task and then ignoring its returned task handle.

[…]

Swift 6.4 also implements SE-0530: Async Result Support.

[…]

Swift 6.4 implements SE-0518: ~Sendable for explicitly marking non-Sendable types. It allows you to communicate that a type has been audited and should not conform to Sendable.

Slava Pestov:

I thought it would be a good time to detail some of the type checker performance improvements we worked on since I shared the type checker performance roadmap last year. I’m also going to outline a couple of things we plan on looking at next.

Previously:

• Swift 6.3
• WWDC 2026 Links
• Xcode 27 Announced
• Swift Pitch: Borrowing Sequence
• Roadmap for Improving the Swift Type Checker
• Swift 6.2: Subprocess
• Swift Prospective Vision: Accessors
• Swift Proposal: Precise Control Flags Over Compiler Warnings

Update (2026-07-09): I was optimistic about improvements to the type checker making compilation faster, but I found that compiling my predominantly Swift project with Xcode 27 Beta 3 was only 0.3% faster than with Xcode 26.6. I wonder if there’s some extra setting I’m supposed to enable.