This is a really nice set of transitions when pinching in and out in Photos in iOS 26.

This is trickier than it seems, because it’s not just a linear zoom (like it would be in Maps or Sketch, for example). It’s a zoom and reflow – from 3 items to 1 item per column – which makes things a lot more complicated.

Here are a few nice details about this transition:

• It reacts to your fingers rather than being a rigid transition with a fixed duration.
• It always prioritizes the photo you’re pinching in and out, assuming that’s where you look.
• It smoothly transitions the aspect ratio (from always square when the items are smaller, to native when items are bigger).
• It crossfades the other photos. Cross-fade is the “cheap” answer for transitions, but here it feels appropriate, as it happens in the periphery – actually trying to move the other items linearly between their respective positions would feel unpleasant and distracting.
• In contrast to the other transitions, these crossfades are not fully tied to fingers, meaning you cannot stop in the middle of a crossfade.

Nikita Prokopov on his blog published other examples of problematic transitions, and it seems most of them are struggle in the same way, as transitions that cannot simply be linear. The above transition in iOS shows it’s possible to do it well if you care.

And it’s not just about smoothness or nice feelings. Prokopov:

[…] Desynchronization can lead to a lot of confusion. For example, in Photos, when switching between Crop and Adjust mode, picture snaps into place immediately but the crop border is animated.

This creates a false feeling that something subtly changes when you switch between modes. And you know what? I don’t want my UI to give me false feelings. I want it to be a precise instrument, not an animated toy.

The above iOS transition feels very precise to me.

I mentioned placeholders before in the context of Dropbox Paper…

…and I wanted to share a response by Nikita Prokopov, because he had a great point about those Dropbox Paper placeholders that I didn’t consider:

For me it’s […] confusing placement. Like if somebody writes “Have a nice day” on a door instead of “Push” or “Pull”. I don’t mind seeing “Have a nice day” message somewhere neutral, in a place not occupied by any other function, but not where I expect very specific help.

I was reminded of Prokopov’s comment when I saw this at the airport yesterday:

I remember, eons ago, how impressed I was when one of the Chrome designers was telling me how all of these error pages were specifically designed to feel like liminal spaces and notlike destinations. These were, in a way, placeholder content.

But “Press space to play” feels like a strange thing to put in here. (Previously, the message said “No internet” or “There is no Internet connection.”) I understand that this is Chrome’s popular mascot, but this is still an error page whose purpose is to tell me what’s wrong, rather than serve as an entry point to a minigame.

Also, just a few days ago, I just stumbled upon this fun example of a placeholder collapse – where a temporary text becomes permanent:

If you are curious, this is what it looks like if you don’t forget to set the message. And funnily enough, given where we started, it says “Have a nice day”:

I saw this fly by before, but just today I learned that Pride versioning is a tiny project by Nikita Prokopov, whose work I shared before:

The author says:

This is a parody and a homage to the awesome Semantic Versioning.

…but I think it stands on its own. You can’t have craft without being at peace with pride and embarrassment existing.

Yet another good post by Nikita Prokopov, continuing the theme of icons in Mac OS Tahoe (previously), going into more depth:

In my opinion, Apple took on an impossible task: to add an icon to every menu item. There are just not enough good metaphors to do something like that. ¶ But even if there were, the premise itself is questionable: if everything has an icon, it doesn’t mean users will find what they are looking for faster.

I always liked this kind of an exercise:

There’s a game I like to play to test the quality of the metaphor. Remove the labels and try to guess the meaning. Give it a try:

Also, this must hurt:

Microsoft used to know this.

Nick Heer at the excellent Pixel Envy, commenting on the above post, adds:

This is a gallery of elementary problems. None of this should have shipped if someone with power internally had a critical eye for consistency and detail. If Apple deems it necessary to retain the icons, though I am not sure why it would, it should be treating this post as one giant bug report.

Thank you to Scott and Ezra.

I was just looking at some old 1980s screenshots and wondering “why don’t you ever see syntax highlighting in inverse video”? And then I randomly stumbled upon this deep dive into syntax highlighting from Nikita Prokopov.

I don’t know if I disagree with everything here, but there’s a lot of great stuff in there, and a lot of food for thought.

Highlighting everything is like assigning “top priority” to every task in Linear. It only works if most of the tasks have lesser priorities.

I thought the mention that comments should be visually promoted, not demoted, was particularly insightful.

Also, the idea that light themes are not popular because the colors are duller… this is very interesting. It could be so interesting to try a light theme with very prominent chiefly at the periphery of Display P3.

I have never been very invested in syntax highlighting because I find the UI to change it in text editors is usually pretty harrowing, but now I’m interested.