Before I say anything, I’d recommend you just visit the site of a new little app called Liquid Radius, click around, and see how you feel (don’t install it, though!):

So. One of the design memes surrounding macOS 26 Tahoe from last year – the one with Liquid Glass – was this screenshotted quagmire of mismatched rounded corners:

The tool, Liquid Radius, promises a solution, and then goes to strange lengths to accomplish it.

Fixing the mismatched radii is, apparently, much harder than for example something like Lickable Menu Bar, which many of you have spotted me using via various Unsung screenshots. To get Liquid Radius to work, you have to take a pickaxe to deep recesses of your operating system in order to disable some of Apple’s protective measures – stuff like FileVault (which you have to turn off momentarily) and System Integrity Protection (which you are never allowed to turn back on). The installation requires friendliness with command line and a stomach for multiple reboots, including some of a kind you might have never actually done before.

Then, there’s the website you’ve just seen: elaborate, with nice “before and after” animations, and a fun landing page. I thought the installation steps, given the complexity of the effort, were exemplary and even educational. There’s also a page listing all the apps confirmed to work, and a “How Liquid Radius limits its blast radius” (ha) section, revealing the author is clear-eyed about their work being a hack, and even the dimensionality of its hackiness. Even within the tool there are nice design details.

But, as I was exploring the site, I kept switching between “this is ridiculous!” (laudatory) and “this is ridiculous!” (derogatory) in my head.

At some point it all started feeling like… overkill. Is this really worth all this effort? Are there people who pay for and install this, lowering their system’s overall security and installing unknown code by unnamed developers? Do the ends justify the means? How much do rounded corners matter?

I’ve also seen many products that were a lot more complex, but came with smaller landing pages and fewer snappy taglines. At some point I even had this thought that if you wanted to make The Onion-style joke describing how designers can get incredibly self-serious and obsessed about some teensy detail, the site is exactly what you would do. You’d just never build the actual app.

(Caveat: I didn’t buy or install Liquid Radius for reasons that are probably obvious – nor would I recommend you do so – so I cannot fully discount this actually being an incredibly sophisticated practical joke.)

Maybe it’s my reaction to rounded corners in particular being its own exhausting thing in the design world – a shiny, shallow distraction of product designers in lieu of focusing on more important issues of utility, ethics, privacy, and so on. Maybe it’s the fact I’ve always been suspicious of the oft-told Steve Jobs round rect story: sure, round rects are everywhere in the world, but then so are regular straight corners. Or maybe it’s my own frustration that conversations about macOS and Liquid Glass still feel largely surface-level, on terms established by Apple at WWDC last year.

Speaking of this: timing-wise, Liquid Radius is peculiar, too. This effort was only launched in May, and graduated to 1.0 on the first day of WWDC, the same moment Apple announced they will fix this problem in the upcoming macOS Golden Gate – to audience’s applause – which renders Liquid Radius obsolete, and was an absolutely predictable outcome.

The Liquid Radius creator seemed perhaps surprised by it, and promised to keep the tool running, allowing people to continue customizing their border radii even after Golden Gate makes them all match – but that makes the product an even trickier proposition given the frightening installation steps and the very notion of anonymous, closed-source code being allowed straight into your system’s bloodstream. Besides, if you judge the tool on its own, visual-design terms…

…I don’t think you can simply straighten the corners like they’re showing in the bottom row without rebalancing it with other design changes I’m not sure the tool can make en masse for all the apps.

I know this is navel-gazing, so I will stop. I linked to some third-party fixes before, but this one is newly fascinating. I’m sharing this in part because I don’t know how to feel about it. It reminded me of the mixed feelings I had after watching Jiro Dreams Of Sushi: is Jiro a hero or a villain of this story? I couldn’t say then, and I still don’t know today.

It has been an interesting few weeks to ponder the relationship of style and substance. macOS Golden Gate announcements made me wonder: if you strip Liquid Glass of a lot of its original style via all the reactionary fixes, is what remains even worth the name? The controversial Ferrari Luce reveal not long ago was another rich entry point, especially as for Ferrari the style is a large part of substance.

I’d be curious how Liquid Radius feels to you.

I know I just mentioned the Google Search app, but I’m also in the process of disentangling myself from Google and Gmail after last week’s Google I/O revelations.

On that note, this is an interesting, meandering essay by Ernie Smith at Tedium, reflecting on the enshittification of Google and the two-year anniversary of &udm=14, a simple site that removes AI from Google’s search results:

I spent two hours of my life building a thing. Google has probably spent thousands, if not millions, of collective employee hours building all their AI innovations. And for a surprisingly large number of people, the two-hour workaround I built wins out. There’s a lesson in that.

Somewhere in the middle, the essay transitions into talking about the value of good tools and single-serving websites:

Our world needs more, smaller tools that speak the same language, where everyone makes a little money, but nobody dominates the industry. In the 1980s, the software industry was kind of like this. Oh, sure, Microsoft and Apple were still out front, sucking up all the oxygen. But there were lots of little companies, selling software on disks. The bigger ones put them in boxes in stores. The smaller ones realized that they could just ship software through the mail and let the software spread naturally among user communities.

Shareware didn’t really survive the internet era—but, at least for a while, its spirit did. More recently, that spirit has taken a backseat to the larger companies that realize, if they’re big enough, they can shape how we interact with our world.

In 1991, if you wanted to start a software company, you had to hope that your product was good enough that word of mouth and a P.O. Box could push it around. That’s exactly what happened when Tim Sweeney released ZZT. It became the starting point for Epic Games, the kind of company that today is big enough that, thanks to its Unreal Engine and the success of Fortnite, it can dictate terms to much of the gaming industry.

If you ask me, I want a world where more software is like ZZT than it is like Fortnite, because more people have a chance to succeed in the former environment.

Previously in this general category, we covered Keyhole and (Gmail) Simplify. If you have a favourite small tool or a simple tool-like website, I’d love to hear from you!

In our Unsung yellow pages, in between people writing Chrome plugins to fix UI of other apps, and gamers creating mods to fix bugs that the developers leave behind, we need to make some room for another category of apps.

Some time ago, Daniel Kennett created a little utility called Keyhole with a singular purpose:

Have you ever been annoyed by your Mac’s media keys triggering a random video in your web browser, doing something else weird, or by them doing… nothing? Even though your music player is right there?

Me too! And so Keyhole was born.

Keyhole intercepts media transport key presses before the operating system gets a hold of them, and promises to do a better job dispatching them to the right place.

This week Kennett added another feature – the app will monitor the repeat setting that apparently occasionally gets out of whack, and fix it for the user.

We could call these kinds of apps “janitor apps.” I know of a concept called cron jobs, but I’m assuming these quiet workers do backend-y things like moving files around, cleaning up databases, pinging servers, and so on. I am less aware of work like Kennett’s that fixes stuff on the UI layer.

Is it strange that I find this kind of an app pretty… noble? Of course, Apple should fix it; perhaps Bugs Apple Loves could even introduce a serious multiplier for “a bug bothers someone so much they fix it for Apple.”

Of note in the last dialog box: “Keyhole has fixed Music’s repeat setting X times.” I think this kind of a counter is pretty brilliant.

I had some idea that many popular games have mods to tweak them – from small appearance tweaks and fan-made translations, to bigger gameplay or UI changes (and even an occasional trojan horse).

What I didn’t know was that for some games there is a whole community of modders who do one thing and one thing only: they fix bugs that the developer didn’t bother fixing.

This 1.5-hour (sic!) video by Fredrik Knudsen talks about a story of such a community for a popular game Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim:

I won’t lie: this video was a bit of a frustrating watch. The presentation is dry and takes its time. I was annoyed at Bethesda for not fixing the bugs to begin with and creating the whole mess. Also, some of the people in this story do not appear very mature, and post-Gamergate I have little patience for that kind of behaviour.

On the other hand, this covers so, so many interesting things and provoked so many thoughts:

• how hard it is to agree what a bug even is,
• how a bug fix can introduce more bugs and be an overall net negative,
• how a new distribution method for something can drastically change its nature,
• that everything, as always, boils down to communication,
• that in community- and volunteer-led projects, not spending time on governance will come back and bite you.

Not to mention these topics:

• dependencies
• change management
• centralization vs. federation
• copyright and DMCA
• version control
• volunteer burnout
• issues of trust and ego and power

If you are responsible for bug-fixing processes at a company or with a community, I am curious if you find this video valuable. I did.

The funniest moment was that drama/​debacle about a certain in-game portal was nicknamed… Gategate.

Not to mention the ending is truly poetic, and not something I expected.

I recently learned of the OG App from 2022, which offered an ad-free, simpler experience to users frustrated with Instagram changes.

The app didn’t last – it couldn’t last – but it was a fascinating statement.

In a different corner of the internet, Michael Leggett, one of the former Gmail designers, created Simplify – an alternative “shell” to Gmail:

Hundreds of improvements (small and large) to streamline, simplify, and enhance Gmail’s design and functionality. Hide the features you don’t use, customize the ones you do including setting the list and message width and fonts.

It seems this attempt is not running afoul of any Google rules. I enjoyed reading about the project more on its website, especially this bit:

Bad design can occur for a number of reasons including but not limited to:

• Our needs as users are not well understood, prioritized, or aligned with the company’s goals.
• Entropy: The natural decline of products over time as the vision decays or blurs and new features are conceived without consideration of the whole and added faster than the system’s overall design and architecture can evolve to support them.
• Good design is hard. Good design is more than making a product pretty. It is about having the right capabilities in an intuitive, respectful, and well-crafted offering. I hope to expand on this topic in future posts.

I know ad blockers and “reader modes” exist, but these alternative shells go much further and change the original app’s design. I wonder what other examples of that are out there.