428: ‘Michigan-Starred Fine Dining’, With Louie Mantia

Special guest Louie Mantia joins the show to talk about Liquid Glass, the various OS 26 updates, and the worrisome state of Apple’s UI design overall. Also: sandwiches.

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Transcripts: Unofficial but surprisingly good (podsearch.david-smith.org/shows/11).

Links:

• Louie’s personal website (lmnt.me), chock full of downloadable wallpapers, icons, and more.

• Louie, on Alan Dye: “A Responsibility to the Industry (lmnt.me/blog/a-responsibility-to-the-industry.…)”.

• Louie on Mastodon (pdx.social/@louie).

• Parakeet (parakeet.co), Louie’s design partnership with Luka Grafera.

• Steve Jobs introducing the new icon for iTunes that Louie made (daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/428/sj-itunes-i…) (the best iTunes icon ever).

• Daring Fireball: “Sorry, MacOS Tahoe Beta 2 Still Does the Finder Icon Dirty (daringfireball.net/linked/2025/06/24/sorry-mac…)” (with links, at the bottom, to Louie’s mockup of how Liquid Glass versions of the Finder icon should look).

• My polls on light/dark mode preferences on your phone: Mastodon (mastodon.social/@gruber/114932041394942073) and Threads (threads.com/@gruber/post/DMqPCUkuGVN).

• NeXTStep’s GUI and icons (guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/openstep42), including the realistic “folders” and super-detailed “home” with shrubbery and a tree in front of the house (and another collection just of NeXTStep’s icons (itoda.com/next/openstep/icons/index-en.html)).

• Redweld (redweld.com/expanding-files) — Makers of the iconic (no pun intended) expandable files that NeXT’s folder icons were based on.

• The wonderfully skeuomorphic original interfaces for Apple’s iPhone Voice Memos (oreilly.com/library/view/the-iphone-book/97801…) and Podcasts (webdesignmuseum.org/iphone/podcasts-for-iphone…) apps.

• Steve Jobs introducing Aqua at Macworld San Francisco in January 2000 (youtu.be/dHrVGk0WwYM?t=381).

• A July 1986 draft of the original Human Interface Guidelines (daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/428/HumanInterf…) (PDF) from Apple, including a brief section on “Perceived Stability” (followed by a section on “See-and-Point versus Remember-and-Type”).

This episode of The Talk Show was edited by Caleb Sexton.