Thank you to everyone who answered the call for good software updates from last week. I received so many nominations that the list below is severely narrowed down, but I appreciated every response!

I grouped the answers in sections I saw emerge organically, I included links to apps, and did some light editing for clarity. (You can always explore more answers on Mastodon and Bluesky.)

I hope you find this inspiring in some way – I know I did! – or at least enjoyable.

Something I asked for

People shared examples of improvements they particularly asked for, improvements that meant something for people close to them, or even simply seeing people given credit for ideas:

I’m a space educator and bring a mobile planetarium in schools. I use a piece of open source software called Gaia Sky. It is developed by only one developer, and I seem to be one of only a handful of people in the issue queue requesting updates. Always a prompt and incredible reply from the developer.

I filed a request: “In my shows, I tell the audience that the rings of Saturn are made of bits of ice, rock, and dust. Then when I fly through, it shows a mostly 2D ring system. Has [making the rings use particles instead] been considered before?” I made the issue on February 12, and by May 11 had a Saturn ring system with thousands of little rocks and pebbles running smoothly in my planetarium dome. Kids loved it.

Earlier this year I contacted Fantastical’s Flexibits requesting that hiding an event was accessible through the menu bar, not only in the contextual menu. Few weeks later, they emailed me to let me know the feature was coming in the following release.

The dev behind OpenStreet Browser listened to my feedback and added a filter item to a more logical category.

The recent SailfishOS update brought back the weather app and implemented Bluetooth for the Android support. Both of those are things my dad asked for, so I was quite happy! :)

The [social network] Pachli developer is amazing, the care he puts on everything, and mentioning every people that was involved on new ideas/​fixes/improvements/​translations... I do not remember others doing it. It’s great.

Every Pachli update is a prove of something great happened/is happening... Increases the hope world count a little.

I enjoyed using Easy CSV Editor and JSON Editor by VDT Labs in 2020-ish. Unfortunately, JSON Editor was macOS-only at the time while Easy CSV Editor was also available on iOS. So I contacted the guy behind VDT Labs, and asked whether he planned publishing an iOS version of JSON Editor anytime soon.

He got back to me immediately, said he didn’t have any plans, but liked the idea. He asked for my opinion on a few decisions he’d have to make, then published an iOS app literally weeks later. I love using his software. […] When you published I trust in TextEdit, his stuff came to mind immediately despite getting the occasional feature here and there. It’s nothing flashy, but the apps are simply reliable and haven’t changed much at all.

Apps that are updated respectfully, without changing too many things

On that last note…

The last AntennaPod UI update looked great, but didn’t force me to re-learn how it works. It has remained stable from a UX standpoint for as long as I have been using it.

I use the Infuse app primarily on the Apple TV (but also on the Mac and iPad occasionally) and I’m constantly impressed at their singular commitment to deliver on making their app useful for its users in all sorts of small thoughtful ways on an ongoing basis. Most recently it was supporting Plex and Jellyfin-style folder/​file naming conventions for movie extras.

The only upgrade that always pleases me is a major Debian release. actually I’m happy because it’s been a rock for more than 20 years for me. I hate how everything is perpetually changing in IT nowadays. Debian doesn’t. The only change I fondly remember is when zfs integration got easier.

Updates that showed developers cared about more groups of people than just mainstream

Pachli’s update to include pronouns of the posters in the timestream.

OCR on macOC and iOS expanded into Swedish a while back. Super useful, especially on OS level, so all apps can use it.

Not sure what version, but the recent macOS that added made-for iPhone hearing aid support made a huge difference in my work life.

TL; DR: Apple established a standard for “made for iPhone” hearing aids that pair directly to iPhones quite a few years ago, but it’s only recently (in the post M1 era) where Macs have supported the same protocol. It means that calls and other audio from my work Mac go directly to my aids, without needing a clunky intermediary device worn around the neck. Since I need to wear the aids anyway, it means seamless access to audio. It’s just such a nice quality of life improvement.

An update that made an app better for me was the recent addition of flood warnings to Watch Duty. I have a mountain cabin in California but my main home is now in coastal North Carolina. I installed, and pay for, Watch Duty for warnings on California fires, but I can now also use it for warnings about North Carolina flooding, which can happen during tropical storms.

Updates that felt genuinely focused on helping users

The grocery list/​recipe keeper/​meal planner app AnyList. They just added “leftovers” tags and recipe queues to a recent update and my wife’s over the moon. It meshes perfectly with how her brain operates.

It has not been made fully public, but I am playing with the preview release of [font editor] Glyphs. And it’s great: Huge number of small fixes all around, but the whole UI has been revamped to match the macOS latest. Running variable fonts for testing is so much easier with an axes slider. Lots of editing tweaks that make things much easier. Genuinely nice and useful stuff, they pay attention and listen.

Every upgrade to Halide has made me happy. I can’t think of a specific change but every upgrade seems like it does better what a camera app should do: have stuff where your finger needs to go without thinking about it. Anything that helps my finger hit the right place at the right moment without thinking it’s a win. I think a camera app is the ultimate example of cognitive load mattering.

I’ve been building different things with [web framework] Web Origami and the most recent 0.7.0 beta release allowed me to do a lot of things I couldn’t before.

The creator is an absolute pleasure to work with. He listens to folks using the tool. Every update is gold and makes meaningful improvements based on how people are actually using it.

[Window manager] Niri consistently has extremely well thought and well implemented out features. Many of them are things that I hadn’t even considered wanting from a window manager that I now can’t live without.

Every update I have ever received for the Android application Kanji Study has been delightful. Chase Colburn does a great job with steadily improving the app and adding great new features. There are a bunch of little UI flourishes in it that I think you’d like. The kind of thing that comes from a tight loop between developer and users, smoothing off the edges that provide friction.

Something that comes to mind is the way it implements history. If I clicked on one of the characters in the Kanji listing for 美人, it would take me to the page for that kanji, and it’s easy to end up down a short rabbit hole if you’re the kind of person who enjoys leafing through a dictionary semi-randomly. But there’s a good history functionality that makes it a breeze to get back, and you can jump to an arbitrary point in that history instead of mashing “back” until you get to where you want to be. That’s not award-winning design, but it’s good design.

Updates to core stuff that never asks for limelight

Flighty: I don’t think I’ve seen a team work so hard to get the core use of their app nailed perfectly. No enshittification, no horrific UI changes. Their most recent update just further enhances what they’re great at.

[Painting app] Krita’s latest version has on screen text editing and it’s a very welcome addition to an already great tool!

I don’t know how recent it was, but the one for macOS where you can cut and paste text from images was a real pleasure to encounter.

When [3D modeler] FreeCad hit 1.0 – lots of small improvements in the sketching workbench made an area of the app you spend lots of time in so much nicer.

I’m thinking of the Transit trip planning app, which I love! There’s a bug fix for a problem where you would be en route, then looking at a different app on your phone, then come back to find out that the Transit had been killed in the background, and you had to restart your trip planning. That was a definite problem and i’m excited to hear that it’s been fixed!

I was also reading about the big design update they put out last year, which i continue to enjoy and get a lot of use out of. :)

Overcast! Recent update that added selectable text, and generally they made some good stability improvements recently.

[Text editor] Zed once had “improved font rendering on Linux” in the release notes and the text really looked better after the update.

I really want to share the Fantastical Calendar Mirroring feature. I have happily paid for Fantastical for years. And over that time I have paid for some calendar mirroring tools, none of which I liked for the money. Now I get a streamlined mirroring feature in the app I already love. It was a total surprise too!

I have used Fantastical for years now and, when I had to switch to using a Windows desktop at work last spring, I downloaded the released-but-still-under-development Fantastical for Windows app. I was accustomed to changing the visible calendar group on macOS using Ctrl+1 and would often try it out of habit, even though it wasn’t implemented on the Windows version yet. In fact, I would even mentally convert the macOS Ctrl+1 command to Windows-speak and type Alt+1. Then one day earlier this year, Alt+1 actually changed my calendar group. Much to my surprise, I had again typed the shortcut, despite it doing absolutely nothing many times before, and found that Flexibits had not only added a keyboard shortcut for that setting, they had added the keyboard shortcut I knew to expect coming from macOS.

When did iOS add document scanning with OCR? iOS 17? 18? Much better to use a phone instead of a dedicated scanner for periodic receipt scanning, plus the document then syncs to a Mac.

[Text editor] BBEdit 16 has some nice quality-of-life improvements, like per-project colour settings, which might help me to avoid accidentally making changes to the wrong version of a project, something I’ve done more than once.

This is a sad, sad commentary on my life choices in general, but i happen to be really glad that a recent Outlook for Mac update gained the ability to import PST files. [Legal software] eDiscovery still exports in PST format, so until this feature launched you had another step (or more, depending on your method) in getting exported mail back into a mailbox that lives on a Mac.

App makers working hard on developing trust in ongoing updates

The Playdate game console. They do such a great job adding joy and functionality to the platform with each software update. I continue to love the music and thoughtful interactions throughout, but more specifically the recent-ish update they added to the game browser, adding in folders and improving access to games on the system.

Cities: Skylines II has been on an incredible upward trajectory ever since Paradox gave the game to Iceflake. Optimization, features, just overall feel of the game have all improved since they took over at the start of the year. It’s a great redemption arc for a game that many people want to be great, but fell short in its first few years.

[RSS reader] NetNewsWire: every update does something genuinely useful like action log in one of the latest updates, so I can see what’s the problem if feed update takes suspiciously long time.

Wrike Desktop for Windows: very much a rolling release model, they do a monthly update, and I’m just happy when my work applications don’t break or get a bunch of BS added that I didn’t need (just didn’t want to use enshittification twice in one email). The most recent update was minor, some field admin changes and some further detailed reporting. Can’t beat that.

The release notes I’m always excited for are Zen Browser. They’ve been cranking through a roadmap of user-focused features, and their design is opinionated about it. Not always right, mind, but with strong convictions. Recently, improvements around tab tiling and the addition of “boosts” – color scheme and element zapping without an extension.

Stripe continually improves. it’s the SaaS vendor I use and am most pleased by. Every few months they add a new feature and I usually react “ah, that’s good” and “wow, their documentation is so good I can decide if I want to implement this and implementation will be so easy”

The team at [map software] QGIS consistently makes the app better with each release. Over the years I’ve made my peace with a dorky OSS interface and I appreciate that this isn’t being continually reinvented. Meanwhile, they’re keeping up with all the changes and movements in geospatial tech and ensuring that updates to key packages make their way in.

Let’s hear it for game devs who do free content+QoL updates for years after release. No Man’s Sky is the poster child here, but I’m constantly amazed by the number of indies who substantially add to the game experience long after they’ve been paid. (And yes, I know this helps sell the game + DLCs). I think Criterion’s Burnout Paradise was the first to really surprise me this way. IIRC they didn’t add much content for free (maybe a couple of game modes?), but they overhauled the UI completely.

Yeah, Pachli and [browser] Vivaldi came to my mind too. These are the ones that I’m not afraid to update, and while they were great already, somehow they are still getting better and better.

the Typeface app for MacOS continues to be a spark of joy for me. Recent updates have added a nice font pairings tool and thoughtful UI updates. I always look forward to new updates from this dev.

[Personal finance app] YNAB! This one has been the most consistent over the past few years for me. It feels like every single update just made it so much better. They added a summary home screen, removed some fluff, and added even more reflection features which is really convenient for a budget app.

App makers that feel like they’re going against the current bad trends

For me, every [photo gallery] Ente update so far was a significant improvement and going in the direction I’d like things to go. Recently, I was positively surprised by the new offline gallery feature to use Ente without account from March this year – refreshingly different from where most projects are heading.

NetNewsWire 7 required macOS Tahoe when it came out, but was in a later update made compatible with previous macOS, Sequoia.

[Personal database] Obsidian — one change that was fun.

The folks at FernCRM made their platform AI-optional. They basically will turn off all the AI features if you don’t want them. And for the folks who use those features a tiny bit, they offer selective metering so you don’t have to pay for everything if you don’t use everything.

I literally canceled a premium subscription to a software I liked because it was mandatory and weirdly intrusive. People appreciate choices!

Pretty much any [social network server] GoToSocial update falls into that category for me. [Software framework] Forgejo updates do as well.
I found that projects with a strong anti-AI policy generally deliver delightful updates. I wonder if there’s a correlation. (I really don’t, there is.)

The excellent [podcast app] Pocket Casts just launched generated chapters in podcasts. They’re automatically added with (whisper it) AI, but that doesn’t matter. They just work and are surprisingly useful and delightful to use. This isn’t an “AI feature” - it’s a feature that just happens to have been made possible because of AI.

I find myself looking at the chapters of almost every podcast I listen to now as a sort of preview and taster and navigation menu. Helps me decide if I want to commit to the whole episode or just skip to a particular section. Wonderful stuff. I didn’t realise it would be such a valuable addition until it was added and I started using it. I’ve attached a screenshot from a recent episode of Blair Braverman’s brilliant What To Carry, What To Burn pod (which I can also recommend).

Updates that are presented well and fun to explore

We chatted about good release notes before, and here are some more good updates – ones designed that exude some amount of healthy pride, and ones that people simply enjoy reading.

Every [3D software] Blender and [gaming engine] Godot release brings tons of cool new stuff to play with, and their release notes pages are delightful too! [Blender release notes + Godot release notes]

The first thing that makes me happy is how pretty the notes look. They’re not a boring list of changes.

Soulver 4’s release notes were great: an overview of the new features followed by examples / documentation of how to use them.

I also enjoy reading This Week in Plasma for [Linux distribution] KDE, even if I don’t use it much and it’s not release notes strictly speaking, but the fact they explain what and why they did is so cool.

Apps that don’t pressure people to update

The most delightful part of the [calculator app] Soulver update is that they’re still doing major paid versions (not subscription).

Soulver 2 and 3 never stopped working. (I never got to use Soulver 1, so can’t speak to that.) In fact, the email that announced v4 said: “Please note, there’s no pressure to upgrade if you’re happy staying with Soulver 3, which you can continue to download from here.”

Ever since I started using Blender a few years back, every update has been solid, well documented, and focused on improvements to real things its users care about. Whenever I check the release notes it’s like: “new geometry nodes! more cycles renderer optimizations! more compositor features!” Even if this post jinxes it and the next release has all kinds of AI garbage grafted onto it, it will also never force me to update.

Particular updates that stuck in my memory

I really liked this section:

You asked for recent, but about 30 years ago I got a BIOS upgrade which fixed a bug in the HD driver and made it quicker. That was sweet.

I was just thinking the other day about how the MKII version of Roland’s MC-500 sequencer software is still one of the most joyous software updates I can ever recall. This was in like 1987 or something.

The details are somewhat lost in the mists of time but I just remember getting a whole boatload of new functionality, some of which I didn’t even know I needed, and yet it all fitted perfectly within the conventions established by v1 so there was nothing new to learn in terms of the UI. Amazing stuff for what was essentially a numerical keypad and a few function keys.

The MkII software came out when they released MkII hardware – but was completely compatible with my MkI. That was the big joy about it, getting all the great new features without having to obsolete/​upgrade my hardware. (I think it even came with a sticker to put over the logo.) Can you imagine that?!

I hope you’ll forgive me breaking the rules a little bit, but one of my favourites ever was Super Mario Brothers 3.

Let’s pretend as we all should that Super Mario Brothers 2 never existed and look at SMB3 as a sequel that fixed so many things from SMB:

• You could now go backwards in a level in case you missed something
• You could replay a level you’ve already cleared to explore and find new things
• You had a place to put power-ups for later
• You could freaking fly

Perhaps that’s the dream – to release an update so good that the users think about forever.

I have to admit that when a reader wrote to me and said…

Every point release of BBEdit delights me. I live in BBEdit. It’s one of the few packages for which I read through the release notes every time (they often have spots of hilarity).

…I got a bit concerned. One thing that I hate more than wasted release notes (“Bug fixes and performance improvements” is the boilerplate’s boilerplate) is funny release notes – the ones where instead of actually conveying what changed, the text field is used for something, erm, “creative.” (Perhaps most infamously, Medium had had a spell of “fun” release notes about 10 years ago, to a mix of amusement and blowback).

But I needn’t have worried. The release notes of BBEdit are just plain old solid good work, with only a sprinkle of humor:

• The “Zoom” command makes a triumphant return to the Window menu.
• Fixed crash which would occur when displaying completions from language servers which violate the published specification and provide something other than a string for the details field of a returned completion item. (glares at Solargraph)
• SNUCK IN A SPECIAL FEATURE FOR CRAIG NO NOT HIM THE OTHER ONE I HOPE HE LIKES IT

It’s been a while since we looked at release notes, and these are a great example of something that can help you understand not just what an application is, but what it will become. For example, I saw this fly by…

• Made a change in the minimap so that punctuation isn’t greeked, which helps improve visualization.

…and even though I have never used BBEdit, I immediately started nodding. It made sense; greeking is helpful for letters, but I can see how it can do more damage than good for punctuation that has a pretty specific visual signature. BBEdit’s author knows what they’re doing.

Another person (whom you might recognize) chimed in to say:

Nothing in BBEdit is “abandoned.” Everything is on the table for possible improvements. Also remember that this is an app that was originally written for classic Mac OS!

This made me think about what separates apps that you’re excited to keep growing from the apps you’d rather see frozen in time.

The release notes of BBEdit made me trust it so, so quickly. Not just the pace of change and clarity of communication, but also indeed this certain feeling that the product is “alive” in all the right ways. Even if I don’t know or use the features, I quickly get a sense that the changes are for me, or at least other people like me, rather than serving unspecified corporate needs, chasing fashionable trends, or pursuing unnecessary pivots. Hell, even the ratio of changes – new features vs. quality-of-life fixes vs. performance improvements – seems good.

On top of all that, it’s fun to read good release notes, because you can learn something new. These, to me, were fascinating:

• “Entab” and “Detab” have had their names changed to “Convert Spaces to Tabs” and “Convert Tabs to Spaces”, respectively. This is more verbose but less abstruse.

Jargon!

• There is a new setting in the Keyboard preferences: “Enable macOS “Help” key”. This is off by default, so that pressing the “Insert” key which is present on some PC-style keyboards doesn’t open the in-application help. (This frequently happens accidentally.)

Keyboards!

• If an FTP browser window is active and disconnected, “Open from FTP/SFTP Server” will start its connection sheet, rather than doing nothing.

Determinism!

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 thought Safari’s release notes are pretty good – exhaustive, direct, something you won’t ever read for pleasure, but something you can actually learn a lot from even if you are just scanning.

I wish either MDN or Can I use… integrated them in some way (and, of course Chrome’s and Firefox’s as well), so that looking up a certain feature or property – for example, will-change – would show you the recent changes in browsers in reverse chronological order, which could help you understand the details of the feature evolving, and help with debugging.

I saw this screenshot the other day (link):

I never particularly liked those “cute” app updates that were all the rage some… 10 years ago? Or app updates that are too generic. I always felt the updates should be informative, and I occasionally like seeing what’s actually being fixed, and sometimes learning from it.

The post above is about a game called Dwarf Fortress that I have never heard of, despite it going on since 2006. In that game, actual descriptions of bug fixes often feel better than those creative app updates. Some examples:

• Zombies start conversation with necromancer adventurer who tries to sleep in their house
• Cats dying for no reason - alcohol poisoning?
• Giraffe is trainable for war
• Added mouths

PC Gamer some fun ones in 2016, or you can just go to Dwarf Fortress Wiki and explore on your own.

The game seems fascinating, by the way.