Today was my first opportunity to attend an in-person session with Apple. I had missed the opportunity to book a Liquid Glass session in the summer so I was pleased to have the opportunity to join one 3 months in to the Liquid Glass roll out and to hear first-hand experience from a selection of the big App Store players and how they were able to be there with the new paradigm for day 1 of iOS 26.
I'll be applying for the chance to attend more of these sessions in the future, it was a great session and while I'd already devoured the dev material from WWDC, it was great to get a more informed opinion from other engineers in the app dev space and some more context from Apple themselves.
Read the post from week 425
2025 saw a bit of a slowdown over on Good Gear Club, but I still shared almost 100 items and while there's still time, not sure I can hit that number this year. Over the course of 3 years, more than 590 items that are well designed have been shared so it's a steady build of content without any filler which I'm quite proud of.
If you're looking for something special as a last minute gift for Christmas, you can look back at all the items shared in 2025 on Good Gear Club. You can also see all previous years and I wrote a short post on the Good Gear Club blog as I try to build that out some more too.
Read the post from week 424
I find myself taking an anti-JS, pro-CSS approach in my personal projects. The modern web has moved on in ways I couldn't imagine over the past decade but frameworks appear to dominate the way in which a lot of developers approach web development.
When I was prototyping an app idea, I didn't know how to approach an algorithm in SwiftUI so asked ChatGPT for the answer in JavaScript. It took a lot of prompting to avoid using any framework, including JavaScript.
I'd love to see more focus on the native web being the gold standard for web development. Frameworks often prove their worth on massive projects of for projects with large teams behind them, but often they're wrong tool to reach for.
I've not recruited for a while, but I thought this entire chat between Kevin Powell and Adam Argyle was really interesting. It certainly got me thinking about how to approach the task in the future, but the bit that really stuck out to me was Adam's comments about his approach to a choice that he could make during a coding challenge.
Read the post from week 423
I've been thinking about a layout I want to experiment with for a hero landing page where the header / primary message is front and centre and the navigation then sticks to the top once it reaches the top. Easy enough, but I thought it would be nice to have the navigation only be as wide as the content until it becomes sticky.
Following on from last week's post on scroll driven animations, it was pretty simple to work out with no JavaScript required. The graceful fallback is to just show at the same width as the content no matter what.
As you scroll, the nav takes over the top and stretches to full width and remains sticky.
A very basic demo but it works! I ended up setting the line-height to 1 and using the known font sizes to make sure the nav appears at the bottom of the view on initial load.
Read the post from week 422
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Following on from last week's look at colour spaces, another CSS topic I've wanted to dive into is scroll driven animations.
I had already applied them to the app pages for when the device preview appears on scroll, like on the Team Sheets marketing page I have.
An interaction I see often is an element growing on entry and shrinking on exit. It wasn't obvious to me how you achieve this, but I managed to cobble a demo together:
The important bit for me turned out to be the keyframe definitions. I thought there might be a way to specify entry and exit values to the animation-range but I found that the keyframe edits were just fine.
You can see the code in the demo above, but I'll put the code here too. It's makes sure the browser supports the functionality so you should consider fallbacks where it makes sense to have one:
@supports (animation-timeline: scroll()) {
#contentBox {
animation: marginFlexer ease-in-out both;
animation-timeline: scroll();
}
@keyframes marginFlexer {
0% {
margin-inline: 10vw;
}
50%, 80% {
margin-inline: 5vw;
}
100% {
margin-inline: 10vw;
}
}
}Read the post from week 421
Finally.
This always should have been at the browser level. It also needs to be extremely clear exactly what is being given up if you choose to accept cookies from a vendor in plain language. There's just no point otherwise.
Odd that this is coming about not long after complaints about Apple's App Tracking Transparency feature. Isn't this effectively the same thing?
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Not strictly new, but I've not really dived into colour spaces in CSS much at all but have been looking at them recently because I knew they would provide smoother gradients for me.
Can I Use says there's over 90% support for Oklab and Oklch so definitely time to give them a go.
The first thing that stumped me was being able to specify the direction of a gradient and the colour space at the same time. Pretty simple actually because you can just chain them together:
background-image: linear-gradient(to top left in oklch, red, blue);
The above renders a gradient that starts with red in the bottom right and ends towards the top right in blue. The colour space is Oklch which is a lot more pleasing than the regular sRGB one that we're used to.
This post is really a reminder for myself. I've not relied on images for gradients in years but the CSS equivalent hasn't always been the best representation of a gradient but these get us to a really good place.
Read the post from week 420
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5 weeks ago I wrote about taking part in Weird Web October and got of to a strong start, but I didn't make it past week 16. That's over half way, but I had ideas for some of the other weeks and I don't know if it counts submitting items after the month has finished!
My biggest failing was time, in early October I found I had plenty but that seemed to evaporate.
I approached the project in a way that means I wrote little JavaScript and kept styling to a minimum. Templating should have made that easier but I messed up tags a few times for submissions and I didn't always nail the approach first time.
16 out of 31 isn't bad. I might revisit a few when I have some time and I intend to look out for the same event in 2026.
Read the post from week 419
Do I sketch on paper of begin designing in Sketch?
What if I prototype and mockup at the same time?
Prototype with code?
Ultimately, I fall back to that last option, which isn't always ideal because it can often mean trying to carry on with a concept that is likely to have evolved rather than one that was clearly defined from the start.
I do sketch on paper sometimes, but bullet-pointing ideas fits my mental models better and helps to start mapping out what direction I should go in.
I do have a number of app ideas loosely defined so this post is a reminder to myself not to jump into code, but to prototype in an app like Sketch first. I think that will provide me with better validation for an idea. Once it's committed to code, it's very hard for me to give up on an idea!
Read the post from week 418
Come on, Germany! You're on the wrong side of this. Apple did abuse it's position with App Tracking Transparency, in the eyes of advertising companies (Meta and Google included) but took this action in an effort to protect their customers.
The fight to have in this space is asking exactly why Apple would need to implement such a feature at all if our privacy wasn't constantly being invaded. Advertising is more lucrative now because you can target with unnerving accuracy. Just because it's possible doesn't mean it's ethical.
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I was working on a photography app where it would help you pick the right settings to get the right exposure for your lighting conditions. I ended up with an intuitive app but getting results that made sense for the current conditions was much harder than I anticipated.
This video highlights how much variance there is when playing with exposure, aperture and shutter speeds. It's given me lots of information to think about and I'll be revisiting the app to see if it's worth pursuing or not. Even if it's not, I've taken a lot away already for when I'm next using my DSLR.
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John Gruber:
They just think they need a “pro” laptop, and underestimate just how incredibly capable MacBook Airs are.
Totally agree with this. In the Apple Silicon era, the MacBook Air's have never been more capable. For my work laptop, I now use a M4 MacBook Air with 24GB of RAM. It surpasses my previous 13" Intel MacBook Pro in every way and even my old personal 15" MacBook Pro was never this capable. I went for the M4 Pro MacBook Pro as my personal laptop because I know I'll be pushing it for development but for the majority of buyers, the MacBook Air is the device they should be considering.
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We're looking at lights and sockets that need fitting and I'm in a position where I can improve the WiFi connection in various bits of our property and even into the garden.
I'm implementing two different sockets with WiFi extenders built in to see how they perform. I think they'll actually do the job and improve our coverage.
The backup plan (I'm waiting for Black Friday) is to go for something hard wired. Powerline adapters have been on my radar for more than 15 years but I've never tried them. We need better coverage, for reasons, later this year and while I hope WiFi is good enough, the Powerline adapters might be the way to go.
We're limited to the internet speeds we can get into our property so I'm in two minds about investing in a router right now. I think I'll take the plunge when we have significantly better speeds available to us.
I do remember having issues with my non-Pro MacBook and WiFi extenders in the past, but that was back in the early 2010s. We still a Belkin extender in the summer when we're in the garden more but I think a more permanent solution is worth the small investment now. If it's not working out I may not be able to wait for Black Friday, but if it does, maybe I won't need to do anything more!
While we are a Philips Hue household, I am opting not to go the smart lights route. I've already had to replace a colour bulb but couldn't stomach the cost of a single bulb so opted to by a fixed white one instead. It's fine but it's lost it's magic. I don't need more devices to manage so opting to go for physical switches.
Read the post from week 417
This is probably the most sensible take on the current discourse around Apple's decision to take chargers out of the box in the EU (and the UK).
Sounds like the EU's mandate is for customers to be able to opt out of including a charger, but Apple have taken a consistent stance with their products where you have to opt in.
I still have MagSafe 1 and MagSafe 2 chargers at home so when I upgraded to the M4 Pro MacBook Pro I don't know if I'd have stumped up for their power brick. I ended up with a 200W UGREEN hub which powers more than just my MacBook Pro. Apple's 96W and 140W chargers only provide one USB C port anyway.
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I have previously commented on my AI scepticism and while I'm not against using it, I do have plenty of reservations on how it is being applied.
I came across a short video series by the BBC and The Open University on the topic AI. I've embedded them below for you to watch and I think they give a balanced status update.
How AI can help YOU - at home and at work!
Read the post from week 416
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