9to5Mac:
iOS 26 alarms 🐘 vs iOS 18 🤏
Previously, the Snooze button was much larger than Stop, and they were separated. I think both of these points helped prevent accidentally turning off an alarm that you only meant to snooze.
Jack Fields (via Trung Phan):
At Apple, we found that when both buttons are the same size, people were 30% more likely to oversleep. During testing, we had a version of Clock that logged all touch gestures into a heat map. It was recording where our sleepy hands were smacking around on the screen in order to see how accurate we were in turning off the alarms. It turns out we are pretty shit at it. Snoozing an alarm means you get another chance to try waking up again in a few minutes so it’s low risk. By making the button the stop button such a small hit target, it ensures you’re awake enough to actually stop it.
Jack Fields:
This new design is…interesting. It goes against any studies I was a part of so I’m curious what data they have to support the change. It’s terrifyingly large now.
This seems like the phone call buttons to me, where the previous design was clearly better.
Maynard Handley:
I’m less interested in the UI of buttons and much more interested in the fact that, 10+ years after Apple Watch was first released, it’s still utterly shit at handling time zones.
We have three types of object, Alarms [with Sleep alarm as a special case], Reminders, and Calendar events. They all behave differently when you change time zones, and every one of them gets something wrong.
Not to mention that since some watch update a few months ago, the time shown in an alarm complication is wrong. If you switch off the sleep alarm after sleep time has kicked in, the complication does not update the displayed time.
Previously:
Bug Clock.app Design iOS 26 Time watchOS watchOS 11
Howard Oakley (Hacker News):
Disk images have been valuable tools marred by poor performance. In the wrong circumstances, an encrypted sparse image (UDSP) stored on the blazingly fast internal SSD of an Apple silicon Mac may write files no faster than 100 MB/s, typical for a cheap hard drive. One of the important new features introduced in macOS 26 Tahoe is a new disk image format that can achieve near-native speeds: ASIF, documented here.
This has been detailed as a major improvement in lightweight virtualisation, where it promises to overcome the most significant performance limitation of VMs running on Apple silicon Macs. However, ASIF disk images are available for general use, and even work in macOS Sequoia. This article shows what they can do.
Documentation is minimal at this point, and the macOS tools for manipulating ASIF disk images are limited compared with those for other formats, but this looks really promising.
Oakley has a table comparing the performance with other types of disk images when stored on internal SSDs, but the comparisons are not really apples-to-apples because they were made using different Macs. I did some quick benchmarks using the same Mac and SSD and got much slower results than he did in absolute terms, I think because I was using an external SSD connected via USB. However, in relative terms I found that .sparsebundle was about 50% faster at writing than .sparseimage and that .asif was about 1,000% faster. Read speeds were similar (and fast) among the formats. Benchmarking is tricky, especially with SSDs, so I don’t make any specific claims about what these numbers mean, but they are at least encouraging.
I’ve added preliminary support for ASIF disk images to the new public beta version of DropDMG.
Previously:
Disk Image DropDMG Mac macOS Tahoe 26 Virtualization
John Brayton:
I would not have figured out how to use this tool without help, so I wanted to pass along the correct way to use it.
[…]
On macOS, one sets an alternate icon by drawing it in code using the NSDockTile API. I believe Mac apps have no access to the system-wide Icon & widget style setting or the current tint color.
You can create an icon using NSImage(named: String) and display it in the app with an NSImageView. If the icon has any variation between the light mode version, dark mode version, or mono version, the image drawn shows the mono version.
When I add multiple .icon files to a Mac app, Xcode seems to only include the app’s default icon. It seems to ignore the others. The icon is included as a .icns file that appears to be generated from the .icon file. It is probably possible to generate those .icns files some other way and include those as resources.
See also: Brad Ellis (via Mastodon).
Previously:
Design Icon Composer Icons Mac macOS Tahoe 26
Zac Hall:
Spotted by @StellaFudge on X, macOS Tahoe 26 includes a warning message when using Time Machine to back up a Mac to Apple router-connected storage.
The next major version of macOS will no longer support AirPort Disk, or other Time Capsule disks, for Time Machine backups.
I wonder if this is because they’re removing AFP entirely, after recently deprecating it in macOS 15.5.
Joe Rossignol:
Starting with macOS 27, [network Time Machine] backups will require a storage drive that supports more current file-sharing protocols like SMBv2 and SMBv3.
Time Capsules only support AFP and SMBv1, I think.
Previously:
AirPort Express AirPort Extreme Base Station Mac macOS 27 Networking Sunset Time Capsule Time Machine
