The Talk Show With John Gruber

442: ‘Bad Dates’, With Jason Snell

Sonntag, 1. März 2026 · 2 h 17

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Jason Snell returns to the show to discuss the 2025 Six Colors Apple Report Card, MacOS 26 Tahoe, Apple Creator Studio, along with what we expect/hope for in next week’s Apple product announcements.

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

Links:

• Apple in 2025: The Six Colors Report Card (sixcolors.com/post/2026/02/2025reportcard).

• Kieran Healy, in a post at Six Colors published after we recorded the show: “Charting the Vibes in the 2025 Apple Report Card (sixcolors.com/post/2026/02/charting-the-vibes-…)”.

• Kieran Healy’s homepage/weblog (kieranhealy.org/blog).

• My 2025 Apple Report Card (daringfireball.net/2026/02/my_2025_apple_repor…).

• Upgrade: “The Shifting Sands of Liquid Glass” (sixcolors.com/post/2026/02/charting-the-vibes-…), wherein Jason and Myke discuss this year’s report card, and Jason makes rascally comments supporting MacOS 26 Tahoe. (And Myke isn’t much better.)

• Apple’s July 2025 announcement of the Apple Manufacturing Academy in Detroit (apple.com/newsroom/2025/07/apple-manufacturing…).

• Derek Sivers, in 2005: “Ideas Are Just a Multiplier of Execution (sive.rs/multiply)”.

• underpassapp.com/ChangeTheHeaders — a Safari extension I convinced Jeff Johnson to build, which, among other things, allows me never to be served WebP images in lieu of PNG or JPEG.
• underpassapp.com/StopTheMadness — the older sibling, companion Safari Extension to ChangeTheHeaders that gives you explicit control over all sorts of web features, on a per-website basis. (I conflated the two during the show.)

• WebP (developers.google.com/speed/webp).

• Mac Launchers:
• LaunchBar (my favorite, and until Tahoe, Jason’s too) (obdev.at/launchbar).

• Alfred (alfredapp.com).

• Raycast (raycast.com).

• Tuna (tunaformac.com).

• Quicksilver (qsapp.com).

• Incomplete list of what’s wrong with MacOS 26 Tahoe:
• Terrible app icons (daringfireball.net/linked/2025/11/07/tahoes-te…).

• The terrible idea to include inscrutable, inconsistent icons next to just about every menu item in every app, as documented by Jim Nielsen (blog.jim-nielsen.com/2025/icons-in-menus) and Nikita Prokopov (tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-icons), and linked to by yours truly here (daringfireball.net/linked/2026/01/06/nielsen-i…) and here (daringfireball.net/linked/2026/01/05/hard-to-j…), respectively.

• Norbert Heger: “The Struggle of Resizing Windows on macOS Tahoe (noheger.at/blog/2026/01/11/the-struggle-of-res…)” — and a follow-up (noheger.at/blog/2026/02/12/resizing-windows-on…).

• Daring Fireball: “Why It’s Difficult to Resize Windows on MacOS 26 Dyehoe (daringfireball.net/2026/01/resizing_windows_ma…)”.

• Daring Fireball: “Bad Dye Job (daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job)”.

• Stephen Hackett’s MacOS Screenshot Library at 512 Pixels (512pixels.net/projects/aqua-screenshot-library).

• Steve Krug’s classic book, “Don’t Make Me Think” (amazon.com/Dont-Make-Think-Revisited-Usability…).

• The Appearance Manager and the themes that never actually shipped for classic Mac OS (atpm.com/6.08/gui-junkie.shtml).

• Comparing Alan Dye’s horseshitty introduction of Liquid Glass at WWDC 2025 to Steve Jobs’s introduction of Aqua back in 2000 (daringfireball.net/2025/06/some_brief_thoughts…).

• Manu Cornet’s 2011 classic: “Organizational Charts In Major Tech” (ritholtz.com/2011/07/organizational-charts-in-…).

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

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