Ken Case:

OmniFocus 4.9 adds support for Siri AI, optional new date parsing assistance via Apple Intelligence, and a range of new and updated App Intents exposed as Shortcuts actions.

[…]

In our testing we’ve found that the new Siri AI hasn’t yet learned how to work with app capabilities that it hasn’t specifically been trained on, even for App Intents that are available in Shortcuts and Spotlight. For example, its understanding of how to work with OmniFocus is based on how it’s been trained to work with the Reminders app. Our work in OmniFocus 4.9 means that Siri now knows about “reminders” in OmniFocus (i.e. actions and Inbox items), “lists” (i.e. projects) which contain reminders, and any “groups” (i.e. folders) that lists have been organized into. Siri can assign and edit reminder due dates, flags, repeat schedules, and notes and image attachments in OmniFocus. This is another great leap forward! But as soon as you try to go beyond what Reminders can do, you find its limits: for example, it doesn’t understand the distinction between due dates, planned dates, and defer dates.

Siri also doesn’t really understand much about how our document-based apps work, because Apple hasn’t trained it on our specific apps or anything equivalent. So, Siri doesn’t know how to make an outline, or a diagram, or a Gantt chart. We expect this to improve over time—after all, we’ve worked with other language models that do understand how to make those things—but it’s important to understand Siri’s current limits.

[…]

With Siri AI, Spotlight becomes even more important as a source for personal context. You can ask Siri about content in your OmniFocus database, so Siri can summarize the actions you’ve completed this week, or tell you what items you might consider working on soon.

My favorite change in OmniFocus 4.9 seems less exiting, but I’m irrationally happy about it. Last year, as part of the Liquid Glass update, they redesigned the Perspectives Bar on iOS to automatically collapse and expand as you scroll. I found the animations distracting, it messed up my muscle memory, and it required lots of extra taps. In 4.9, there’s a new Show Perspective Bar option, which you can set to Automatically (the 4.8 behavior), Manually (stay collapsed but expand when you tap), or Always (show the expanded state all the time, nothing moves). This is, of course, what I chose.

I’m still seeing the previously mentioned glitches in the Mac app with tabbing, spontaneous tag collapsing, and the window moving itself between spaces. The iOS app sometimes still shows an out-of-date list of flagged actions.

Previously:

• Siri AI Ships (But Still Beta)
• OmniFocus 4.8.10

SpamSieve 3.3.2 is an update of my Mac e-mail spam filter that improves remote training, can export more rule information, and improves uninstallation, help, and more. The most significant news is that Microsoft has changed plans again. They will no longer be preventing users from continuing to use Legacy Outlook and in fact will keep it available for download as part of the combined Outlook app. This gives more time to adapt to their change in plans for AppleScript. Exchange (EWS) support remains an issue. Microsoft is still planning to cut off Legacy Outlook users, and Apple has yet to announce when Mail will support Graph. So far, I’ve not heard that it’s enabled in the macOS 27.2 beta.

We’re participating in a seasonal festival of artisanal software called SummerFest. For a limited time, you can get a 25% discount on new purchases of SpamSieve, EagleFiler, and other top Mac apps from our indie developer friends.

Some interesting engineering issues were:

• Updating NSWorkspace APIs introduced a problem because with the old launchApplication(at:options:), the .withErrorPresentation option is off by default, whereas with the newer openApplication(at:configuration:completionHandler:), the promptsUserIfNeeded option is on by default.

• Previously, Core Data would strip leading BOMs from NSStrings when saving to a SQLite database. With macOS 27, this happens for Swift Strings, too.

• I have lots of unit tests that check for memory leaks. These caught a change where addPersistentStore(type:configuration:at:options:) now seems to return an autoreleased store. Without adding a pool, it looked like there was a leak.

• Also, the tests were finding lots of “leaks” because KVO was retaining NSTabView, which retains a controller. Previously, XCTestCase.waitForExpectations(timeout:) would spin the run loop, and everything would get cleaned up. With Xcode 27 and macOS 27, I need to manually spin the run loop before waiting for the expectations.

• During a software update, macOS may decide to reload the Dock icon. The application package no longer exists because it’s been replaced with a new version. This wasn’t a problem before because SpamSieve had been drawing to an image in memory and setting that as the Dock icon. Now, with the Liquid Glass–imposed removal of custom Dock icons, macOS tries to load the icon from disk, and rather than handling errors gracefully it will crash. I fixed this by setting an image with a memory representation before starting a software update.

• SpamSieve 3.3.1 introduced a crash affecting a small but significant number of users when doing a Core Data fetch of a large number of objects. The private [_PFManagedObjectReferenceQueue _processReferenceQueue:] method was seemingly releasing an object that had already been released. What’s odd is that, as far as I can tell, none of the related app code had changed since the previous version, yet suddenly crashes started happening all the way from macOS 12 through macOS 27. If I had to guess, this was triggered by upgrading from Xcode 26.2 to Xcode 26.6. Maybe Swift’s ARC optimizations are doing something subtly different?

  The crash was triggered by an autorelease pool that I had inserted to promptly clean up any temporary objects after a fetch. (The actual fetched objects were returned and used outside of the pool.) Interestingly, both Gemini and ChatGPT were convinced that this is a well-known exception to standard memory management rules. They said it’s never safe to use managed objects outside of a pool they were fetched in because they depend on internal Core Data objects that the pool will have released. I was not able to find any basis for this “belief,” but it was easy enough to test. As expected, removing the pools (during the beta cycle) just made the same crashes happen slightly later.

  I think there’s probably something wrong in Core Data’s internal bookkeeping, but this does not seem to be a popular crash (and I’ve never seen it on any of my Macs), so my code must be doing something uncommon to trigger it. My current best guess is that it was related to calling refreshAllObjects() after saving. (I bet there’s some fancy bookkeeping to make that efficient.) I was doing this throughout the app to break retain cycles so that unused objects could be deallocated. But it wasn’t necessary in this particular case because the entity being fetched has no relationships. So far, removing the refresh seems to have stopped the crashes, but I won’t know for sure until more people have been using this version for a while.

Previously:

• The End of EWS in Mail and AppleScript in Outlook
• SpamSieve 3.3.1
• SpamSieve 3.2.2

Andrew Cunningham:

The Golden Gate update to Liquid Glass solves a fair number of the most common criticisms through both design changes and customizable settings. It doesn’t fix everything, and the changes are primarily iterative—if your quarrel is with the overall design direction, this update won’t help you.

[…]

The net effect of all of Golden Gate’s design changes isn’t huge, and Golden Gate still looks more like Tahoe than like any previous version of macOS. Some controversial decisions remain in effect, like putting any non-squircle icons into “squircle jail” so they can think about what they’ve done.

[…]

But based on reactions I’ve seen during the betas, I expect these tweaks will be just enough to quell the loudest complaints, at least for people who were using Liquid Glass as an excuse not to upgrade.

It’s better than before but doesn’t go anywhere near far enough. Every time I do testing on a pre–Big Sur Mac (or even on Sequoia) I get sad about what we’ve lost.

Howard Oakley:

The most obvious improvement in Liquid Glass from Tahoe is the change from a choice between Clear or Tinted to a replacement slider. This also features one of the new Easter Eggs, a beautifully rendered image of Clarus the Dogcow.

[…]

Quite why Apple has pushed this decision so far forward I don’t understand, though. As with the previous options, for this slider to work, Accessibility settings like Reduce transparency must be turned off, on the basis that you can’t have too much of a good thing.

Basic Apple Guy (Bluesky):

Nature is healing

Jesse Grosjean:

I do appreciate some of the fixes in macOS 27. But this work ain’t done yet. What is even happening in this inspector[…]

TanglyConstant9:

macos 27 system settings graphical bug

Jeff Johnson:

Everyone is going to pretend that Liquid Glass is fine now, “nature is healing”, and such total bullshit.

The Overton NSWindow had shifted so far that nobody even knows what’s good and bad anymore.

macintog:

I skipped macOS 26 entirely out of utter contempt for the criminally bad UI. I’ve lived on macOS 27 since the first Developer Beta. It’s in great shape, the most mature x.0 in many years (unsurprisingly considering they began its development two months earlier than usual).

Jeff Johnson:

The widget only appears only when hovering over a certain area, and the only item in its popup menu is Show App in Finder…

Jim Chaffin:

Opened the new version of Mail in the just ‘upgraded’ Golden Gate and immediately went searching for a fix! Included is what the Mailboxes Sidebar looks like in my few months old iMac.

Benjamin Mayo:

I know they did it purposefully to add more contrast to selected items, but I don’t really like the changing font to bold on Golden Gate sidebars. It changes the text size which looks awkward, particularly when it has to truncate.

Steven Woolgar:

Even with Apple’s OS 27 release, Liquid Glass is the software equivalent of super gluing tacky gold gewgaws all over the place.

Peter Witham:

I don’t think Apple did enough testing on Notes in Golden Gate, those group and sort options are empty?

Dominik Wagner:

Oh, what fresh hell of indistinguishable came this new preview app icon’s choice?

Jeff Johnson:

They totally fixed Liquid Glass on Golden Gate.

Rui Carmo:

And, yes, liquid glass is still there. I don’t care about how many sliders they put in, every time I see that I am reminded that if they needed to add it, they blew it.

Previously:

• macOS 27 Golden Gate
• Golden Gate Squircle Jail
• Liquid Glass 27 Slider
• Liquid Glass 27 Icons
• Golden Gate Window Corners
• Golden Gate Sidebars and Toolbars
• Golden Gate Menu Icons

Update (2026-09-23): Kevin C:

I had the run the betas in a VM, and thought the UI was a great improvement over Tahoe. However, it left me unprepared for the new bright edge highlights around buttons and input fields, etc. on HDR displays when actually updating my MacBook. I was glad I could fiddle around with BetterDisplay and disable XDR settings, which removed them. But I would prefer that an accessibility setting like Reduce Bright Effects considered them to be bright enough to reduce.

Update (2026-09-28): Jeff Johnson:

First, on Sequoia the background of the status bar is gray, distinguishing it and the link URL from the web page content it covers, whereas on Tahoe and Golden Gate the background of the status bar appears to be the same color as the web page.

[…]

The second difference between Sequoia and Liquid Glassy versions is that the Safari status bar appears higher on the page with Liquid Glass, presumably due to the exaggerated window corner radius. Thus, going back to the screenshots of my blog post, Liquid Glass can make the status bar text appear almost as if it were part of the web page text. Notice if that if the scroll position is just right, the status bar text fits vertically between two paragraphs, a situation that I could not reproduce on Sequoia, because the status bar text is closer to the bottom of the Safari window.

Mario Guzmán:

Why does my Apple Music sidebar keep doing this!? It is like the top blur-fade mask will extend to the bottom of the sidebar… I have to then quit the app every time…

Update (2026-10-05): Pierre Igot:

In macOS Golden Gate, when you enable the option to “Increase contrast”, the contrast between the button text label and the button background in standard macOS buttons actually… decreases, since the text label stays black and the background gray gets darker.

Update (2026-10-09): Nico Reese (Mastodon):

macOS does adopt some of Liquid Glass’s physical behavior this year, including subtle click animations and springy, bouncy interactions. One major piece is still missing, though: the fluid morphing between button shapes and interface elements that gives iOS much of its distinctive character.

[…]

Overall, Apple’s 2027 design updates are a mixed bag. macOS benefits enormously from the refinements to Liquid Glass and now delivers the most convincing implementation of the material across Apple’s platforms. watchOS also moves in the right direction, while iOS and iPadOS surprisingly lose much of the depth that made Liquid Glass feel truly physical. tvOS and visionOS, meanwhile, remain strangely inconsistent with the rest of Apple’s ecosystem.

D. Griffin Jones:

Preferences aside, you can clearly see on both platforms that dark mode looks much richer. Light mode can only show the cool new lighting effects on an HDR display, because they’re on a 100% white background. They can’t get any brighter unless you have an HDR screen that can go to eleven. There’s just a hint of gray shading to suggest depth.

We had a solution to this in Aqua, starting with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Toolbars and titlebars were gray, not pure white. It’s true that nothing can be higher contrast than white on black, but literally anything has more contrast than white on white.

Megabits:

Although Liquid Glass has been around for one year, the compatibility issues it introduced haven’t completely disappeared. Drawing on a real-world project, SLIT_STUDIO developer Megabits summarizes several common UIKit adaptation pitfalls and the solutions he used to address them.

Gavin Anderegg:

For most of the past week, I tried living with the default mid-point on the slider. I gave up almost immediately on macOS and iPadOS. I lasted much longer on iOS, but I found the glass to have an unpleasant milky hue. Now I’m back to full tinted, mostly because it’s the only way I can stand looking at notifications.

With the previous version of “tinted”, especially in dark mode, there was a nice amount of contrast. The material looked glassy and translucent, but it was pleasantly dark. In the 27 OSs, the tinted mode looks dull, matte, and significantly lighter. The worst part: it still uses white text, leading to universally worse contrast. So now I get worse readability and effectively none of the refractive effects. That sucks!

Gavin Anderegg:

First up, let’s talk tab bars. I think these looked awful in the original Liquid Glass redesign, and in 27.0 they look even worse. Below is an example of three tab bars from Safari in macOS.

[…]

In macOS 26’s dark mode, I had no problem with system menus even when Liquid Glass was set to clear. In macOS 27, even in the fully tinted mode, the menus have much lower contrast.

Mario Guzmán:

Golden Gate UI is miles better than what Tahoe brought us but at the same time, that’s not saying much because Tahoe set the bar so low…

Depois de ter dado as caras nas versões beta dos sistemas da Maçã, a nova identidade visual do Apple Music já está entre nós!

Anunciada há pouco pela fabricante do iPhone, ela abre mão de cores sólidas para apostar em efeitos visuais inspirados por ondas sonoras — e que lembram bastante a linguagem de design Liquid Glass.

Introducing a new identity for Apple Music, physically shaped by an original composition from @fredagainagain1 and NEST Acoustics. pic.twitter.com/LFXLIfexPL

— Apple Music (@AppleMusic) October 21, 2026

Por enquanto, a Apple divulgou apenas o novo logotipo do seu serviço de streaming, criado pela NEST Acoustics.

Para chegar ao resultado acima, eles colocaram o logo do Apple Music no fundo de um tanque preenchido com óleo mineral e o cobriram depois com uma placa transparente no formato de um ícone de app. O efeito de ondas sonoras, por sua vez, foi gerado por uma composição (criada pelo DJ e produtor musical Fred Again…), cuja frequência se moveu pelo tanque.

Foram criadas duas versões do logo: uma apenas com a nota dupla e outra com a wordmark. É possível que as vejamos em uso pelo Apple Music no início de vídeos promocionais e em produções como gravações de shows.

Como tem sido o costume, a Apple publicou um vídeo de bastidores que mostra como se deu o processo de criação desses logos:

A nova identidade visual do Apple Music deverá pintar para todos nas versões 27.2 dos sistemas da Maçã, cujo lançamento é esperado para a semana que vem.

O Apple Music conta com um catálogo de mais de 100 milhões de músicas e 30 mil playlists — muitas delas com suporte a Áudio Espacial (Dolby Atmos) e em altíssima definição, com áudio Lossless. Para quem ama música clássica, há um app dedicado com mais de 5 milhões de faixas, tudo em uma interface simplificada! No Brasil, são três tipos de assinatura: Universitária (R$12,90/mês), Individual (R$23,90/mês) e Familiar (R$40,90/mês). Caso você não seja um assinante, pode testar o serviço de forma gratuita por um mês. Ele também faz parte do pacote de assinaturas da empresa, o Apple One.

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