Archive for July 22, 2025

Tuesday, July 22, 2025

Xcode 26 Beta 4

Xcode 26 beta 3 includes SDKs for iOS 26, iPadOS 26, tvOS 26, watchOS 26, macOS Tahoe 26, and visionOS 26.

Last time, there was only one new item in the release notes for beta 3. This time, they didn’t even update the release notes to say “beta 4.”

Interestingly, Xcode now ships as a .xip archive inside of a .dmg file.

Nico Reese:

And there I was just blindly clicking that xip file and wondering about it failing to extract. Because of course you have to move that xip file out of the dmg first.

It did actually work for me to double-click it on the mounted disk image. It then extracted into my Downloads folder. But it’s big file, so it takes a while, and at first it looks like nothing is happening.

Previously:

Xcode 26 Beta 3

Update (2025-07-23): Xcode Releases:

The download link for #Xcode 26.0 beta 4 has been updated to be a proper .xip file now, and I have confirmed it is identical to the “XcodeXIP.xip” file that was in the DMG previously.

Apple has now updated the release notes for beta 4. The only changes noted:

Removed support for creating new Style Transfer projects.

[…]

Xcode Previews usage will frequently panic on macOS 26.0 Tahoe beta 4.

Tony Arnold:

Absolute LMAO at not being able to do SwiftUI-related development work on the beta release of macOS Tahoe for the next two weeks.

Norbert Doerner:

That is very serious, and doesn’t bode well on the software quality of the “final” version of macOS 26, whenever that will be released.
But macOS 26 so far is the worst version we have seen in the last 20 years, very low product quality with uncounted amounts of questionable, and sometimes user hostile interface choices. Sigh.

Greg Pierce:

Looks like Icon Composer icons are still causing bundle validation issues in Xcode 26b4 builds. 🫤

Andrew Eades:

I’m developing my new app using .NET and MAUI because Apple makes Xcode development unusable for large portions of the year. And I get to use Neovim and/or Rider as well.

Update (2025-08-05): Greg Pierce, Gui Rambo, Dennis Birch, and I are seeing our apps crash at launch due to a problem with weak linking and/or availability checks. The triggering APIs span AVFoundation, WebKit, and AppKit, so I assume it’s an Xcode issue.

Disk Image Icon Composer Mac macOS Tahoe 26 Programming Xcode

Comments

macOS Tahoe 26 Developer Beta 4

Juli Clover:

Apple today provided developers with the fourth beta of macOS Tahoe 26 for testing purposes, with the update coming two weeks after the third beta.

This update did correctly install for me via Software Update.

The only beta 4 item that I see in the releases notes is that it says Xcode Previews will “frequently panic” so you should use beta 3 instead.

Jeff Johnson:

You can barely tell that Continue is a button.

See also his screenshots of Safari private windows, menu backgrounds, and sidebars.

Mario Guzmán:

I love not being able to read the now playing track info.

John Siracusa:

Is there some kind of contest within Apple to see how little contrast can be used while still technically indicating a selection? One of these disks is selected, believe it or not!

Previously:

macOS Tahoe 26 Developer Beta 3

Update (2025-07-23): John Gruber:

There is no good argument for selection states that are anything but instantly obvious. Whoever designed this doesn’t use the app.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

That playback bar though is wild

Todd Thomas:

Tahoe beta dislike I haven’t others complain about yet: the difference in look between the active window and all the inactive ones is way too subtle. I repeatedly have looked at one of my windows, pressed command-w and end up closing the wrong window. Will file a FB because easy enough and don’t need a sample app. Previous OS versions had a much more pronounced shadow + more obvious titlebar changes between active/inactive.

I think the Big Sur change for active windows was a regression, and Tahoe makes it worse.

Nick Heer:

But, still, who steps back from updating a PDF document viewer in which each page is cut off at the corners and thinks yes, this is an improvement? I repeat: a selfish design choice prioritizing Apple’s goals over that of its users.

Francisco Tolmasky:

I think one reason Liquid Glass is causing such a profoundly negative reaction is that it is making a lot of people realize that the idea that they own their computer was actually an illusion. There was a sense that by choosing the Mac and local native apps you were shielding yourself from the "rent everything own nothing" remote worldview, but the inevitability of this coming disaster reveals just how little agency you really have over "your computer.”

Increasingly, the computer feels less like "your house,” and more like being a a senior in high school living in an increasingly tense environment with your parents. You're 17 but they tell you to keep the door open. You want to tell them why you're frustrated in good faith, but they know they're in the power position and just tell you "my house my rules.” It exhausting because there's nowhere else to go, and you're still expected to be productive in this environment.

Garrett Murray:

On macOS especially, some of the new component designs are just baffling, like how sidebars look, how buttons take up so much more room and float for no purpose, etc. This is just a giant, nearly always ugly mess. Apple desperately needs new software design leadership.

Jonathan Wight:

Hard drives get perspective, time machine volumes dont…

[…]

It feels like the Time Machine icon is bulging out at the top.

Update (2025-07-25): Juli Clover:

The first Tahoe public beta is identical to the fourth developer beta that was released on Tuesday.

Jason Snell:

The new design on the Mac doesn’t feel light and glassy, as it does on iPhone and iPad. It’s just a bit of a muddle. I keep noticing how terrible toolbars look in macOS Tahoe, and toolbars are everywhere on the Mac. Apple’s stated design philosophy is to build interfaces that allow content to flow behind them, showing through (a glass, darkly?). The official line is that this makes more space for your content—but, of course, sometimes using computer software means using interfaces to manipulate content and data and other stuff, and it feels like Apple has lost its balance in a quixotic attempt to make every app look like a photo editor.

I also have to point out the hypocrisy of Apple claiming that it’s building better frames for its users’ content. That’s not what’s happening here: Apple is using our content as decoration for its interfaces, using blurred and distorted versions of our images and words to show off those glass interface elements. Sometimes, it works: the feel of a canvas sliding under a bunch of glassy interface elements makes the whole thing feel like a harmonious whole. Other times, it feels like the interface and the content have both been obscured into unusability—and that’s bad.

[…]

But in most contexts on the macOS Tahoe beta, these bubbles don’t look like glass. They look like flat light gray ovals separated from a featureless gray expanse by an amateurish drop shadow. Occasionally, when scrolling content underneath the toolbars, they do spring to life and seem to give off the effect Apple wants, but of course, many (most?) Mac apps just don’t work that way, since the important content is in the window, not sliding through the toolbar.

[…]

After a month using early builds of macOS Tahoe full time, I can confidently report that this is an upgrade that feels like an upgrade. The additional power of Spotlight and Shortcuts is going to delight a lot of longtime Mac users, and I’m really liking the direction Apple is taking Control Center in the menu bar.

He thinks Squircle Jail should be removed before Tahoe is released.

Louie Mantia:

I can’t stop thinking about how in an “adapt your app icons for Liquid Glass” session video from WWDC, the designer said that we no longer have to spend all that time rendering complicated effects in Photoshop (I like doing that!) or making different app icon sizes (I also like doing that!)

It was ridiculous to say. App icons on macOS 26 don’t have hinted sizes, so Apple’s own 16pt app icons look like ass.

See also: Andrew Cunningham’s review.

Previously:

appleOS 26 Public Betas

Update (2025-07-28): new-to-reddit-accoun:

There is a bug whereby upon the system rebooting after installing Beta 4, you see the WiFi selection window during set up. When you select your network, it will just keep spinning. Rebooting does not work.
Apparently the issue is that if there were open windows before it rebooted, it will run into this issue and you will get stuck.

Mario Guzmán:

2000s Apple: Make the UI and the user content distinct from each other.
2013 Apple: Recede the UI and elevate the user user content.
2025 Apple: Fuck it all, just blend the two and fuck them if they can’t read the UI.
Oh Podcasts… what did they do to you? I shouldn’t be able to get the app into a state like this.

Louie Mantia:

Compose icon button opens a new chat instantly. Video icon button opens a classic menu. Plus icon button opens a menu with bigger, colorful icons. Emoji icon button opens a popover.

All of them do entirely different things, in different styles, and there’s no indication which one will perform an action immediately, which one (if any) will have a confirmation, or which one will open a menu.

Dave Nanian:

So, here’s the top of Apple’s own News app, in the public beta. What control is what, do you think?
Gotta say, though, you can certainly focus on the content, since you can’t see the controls! So, designers doing this…mission accomplished?

Louie Mantia:

I may not ever recover from the collapsed state of the sidebar in Messages looking so bad with the inset sidebar and the alignment of the stoplight controls. It is so obviously awful. They could make the sidebar narrower to make the stoplight controls centered, but then the sidebar is reacting to the design decisions of the sidebar inset and spacing instead of how wide it should be without considering those things.

Update (2025-07-29): BasicAppleGuy:

macOS Tahoe Beta 1 → 4 icon changes

Update (2025-07-30): John Voorhees:

I generally like this interpretation of Liquid Glass on the Mac. It feels more vibrant and has a freshness I enjoy that retains the legibility of text in a way iOS 26 doesn’t. There are edge cases where icons and text beneath a translucent window can generate a smudgy effect that doesn’t look nice, but by and large, it’s a workable design.
If that were the whole story of Liquid Glass on the Mac, I’d say it accomplishes Apple’s stated goal of focusing on a window’s content by differentiating elements like the toolbar and sidebar. However, there’s more to Liquid Glass than that.
If you look at the newest apps coming to macOS Tahoe, like Games and Journal, you’ll find the same glassier look found in iOS 26. Buttons are transparent and shaped to distort content beneath them, leading to some of the same legibility issues as iOS.

He also has a thorough review of the new features.

Update (2025-07-31): samuelaweeks:

I can tolerate Liquid Glass, no compact tabs on Safari, and most of the other changes in Tahoe. But this [corner radius] is just unforgivable, doesn’t serve any purpose whatsoever and looks awful in the bottom corners of the screen.

Update (2025-08-01): Benjamin Mayo:

The new design (which includes the Liquid Glass materials and other design changes, like moving search bars to the bottom of the screen on iPhone) is a letdown on macOS. It’s ungainly and reeks of lowest common denominator thinking, rather than designing something specifically for the desktop experience.

[…]

The toolbars might be the worst part. As well as looking a bit ugly, I don’t understand the metaphor they are going for. The drop shadows on the buttons are so harsh, they are almost overpowering. The window sidebars also have heavy shadows. I think the sidebar is meant to be layered above the toolbar, but the shadows are illogical and make it appear like the buttons are floating atop.

The Liquid Glass material is carefully crafted to shine through the content that it is underneath, but this doesn’t really translate to Mac toolbar items, as so many Mac apps use ‘hard’ scroll edge dividers. This means most toolbars simply have solid white backgrounds. The end result is grey button platters sitting on a grey background. Most windows in Mac apps have a toolbar, so this mildly repulsive construction is pervasive across the system. Even when you do find a toolbar with a soft edge, that allows for colourful content to flow behind it, the glass refractions somehow just look worse than they do on iPhone and iPad, punctuated by the unrefined nature of the drop shadows that accompany the elements.

Basic Apple Guy:

macOS Icon History Automator 🤖

Mario Guzmán:

Did they really try to give Automator’s face concentricity?!

Craig Hockenberry:

AKA The bidet icon.

An icon you can’t recognize at a glance isn’t an icon.

Update (2025-08-05): Juli Clover:

We’re on the fourth developer beta and first public beta of macOS Tahoe, which means we’re getting closer to the launch version that’s set to come out in September. With macOS Tahoe now available to the public, we thought it would be a good time to share an initial review of the update.

Mario Guzmán:

I am sure this is a bug or oversight and not an actual design decision here…

But now that you can apply a tint color to glass buttons in the toolbar, if you do, their contrast with the glyph is so bad when the window is backgrounded.

Gus Mueller:

I honestly thought the checkbox button was missing in this macOS Tahoe screenshot[…]

Gus Mueller:

Trick question, is this Tahoe slider enabled or disabled?

Answer: Either. It draws exactly the same either way.

BasicAppleGuy:

macOS Icon History
Disk Utility

Rosyna Keller:

Because Liquid Glass on macOS 26 makes everything use much more space, and thus, makes for bigger touch targets, it’s clear the next MacBooks Pro will have touch screens.

Somehow making the non-content stuff bigger helps prioritize the content.

Mr. Macintosh:

If you thought the Tahoe Disk Utility icon was bad

Look at what they did to Directory Utility

Steve Troughton-Smith:

I think the Mac HIG used to tell you that the toolbar in a Mac window is static and shouldn’t change or add/remove items as you navigate around the app. With macOS 26, that definitely appears to no longer be the case. Apple’s media apps, Music, Podcasts, Books and TV, and Photos, all treat the toolbar as something that can change per view or per tab, something you tend to see more on iOS

Mario Guzmán:

Despite all these changes I am making for #macOSTahoe, I’m still able to easily support back to macOS 13.0 Ventura. It’s sorta fun how different it all looks now… still not liking Tahoe though. Too busy.
I don’t care that it looks “cool” -- “cool” doesn’t help with usability. It should be an organic side-effect, not the driving factor.

Design Icons Liquid Glass Mac macOS Beta macOS Tahoe 26 Music.app Preview.app Safari Software Update Startup Disk

7 Comments

iOS 26 Developer Beta 4

Juli Clover:

Apple today provided developers with the fourth betas of iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 for testing purposes, with the updates coming two weeks after Apple seeded the third betas.

I don’t see any beta 4 release notes yet.

Juli Clover:

Apple has re-enabled Apple Intelligence Notification Summaries for apps in the News and Entertainment categories.

[…]

Apple says that it has improved notification summaries in iOS 26 , addressing issues that could cause confusion with news headlines.

Juli Clover:

With the fourth beta of iOS 26, Apple has again made changes to the Liquid Glass design that’s available across the operating system, tweaking how the menus and buttons appear in apps.

Niléane Dorffer:

The glassy scrubber in the Weather app is a disaster of a UI element

Federico Viticci:

legibility is so back 🙃

Adam Bell:

🙃

Federico Viticci:

Pocket Casts for iOS 18 on the left, Apple Podcasts for iOS 26 on the right.
Between the illegible glass and the tab bar that disappears on scroll, I honestly have no idea who can take a look at this and say “Yes, that’ll do it. That’s good.”
Liquid Glass is a mess so far, especially on iOS. Actually pushing me to use apps without Liquid Glass.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

Thing is, there is no point along the slider between 0 and 100% opacity where Liquid Glass is ‘fixed’. If you’re a developer, you can try this in code. You either have Liquid Glass, with all its issues, or you have an opaque bar — there’s just no leeway for this lensing/blur effect

Previously:

Update (2025-07-23): Marco Arment:

I just don’t see how they could’ve lived with the beta-3 design tweaks, which radically improved legibility from b1–2 and made the design far more usable, and thought, “Nah, let’s undo that.”

Guy English:

Nobody is talking about their A.I. anymore.

Nick Heer:

Apparently there are architectural changes to help with reliability, but the only way to know for certain if a generated summary is accurate is to read the original.

John Siracusa:

“Verify information” indeed, Apple…

Juli Clover:

There are also new features, including the return of Apple Intelligence Notification Summaries for news. This beta is of particular interest because it’s likely the beta that public beta testers will get in the not too distant future.

Marco Arment:

The absolute best thing they could do in their situation is to decide, right now, to ship the iPhones 17 with iOS 18.

iOS 26 is still so rough, and so buggy, that it’s not going to make its ship date without massive quality and design sacrifices.

If the iPhones only support 26, either they’re getting delayed (tanking the financials) or they’re shipping with buggy software and a controversial, half-baked design (a PR nightmare).

Louie Mantia:

I’ve never seen Apple struggle so much during a beta release cycle. They have no idea what they’re doing, and they’re letting everyone in on that. It’s not a very reassuring look.

I previously thought Apple couldn’t possibly ship without Liquid Glass for ego reasons alone, but I’m starting to wonder if they just might revert, because it—quite predictably—shows no signs of improvement.

Kuba Suder:

Thread of how websites look in Safari on iOS 26 😐

Paul Hudson:

I know there’s still a month or so of work to go, but right now I’m really struggling. These text labels matter; why are they so hard to read?

Jeff Johnson:

OMG iPadOS 26 beta 4 wrecked the StopTheMadness Pro extension popup window!

Khaos Tian:

Also the new camera mode picker is a disaster… Did anyone in HI even care at this point???

Dave Mark:

Look at the 3 Liquid Glass buttons at the bottom of the image.

Can’t see them? Can’t read them? Yeah, that’s a problem. 😑

Jeff:

The same thing happens for me in the Mail app. While in Dark Mode, the new Search bar at the bottom switches to REALLY bright mode and turns the Delete/Move icons into mysterious white orbs.

Sean Heber:

Been using it for a few minutes in the simulator and the glass in iOS 26 beta 4 already seems like a bit of a disaster which is saying a lot because it wasn’t without problems in beta 3.

Ged Maheux:

Let’s be clear (LOL): At no point since the announcement of iOS 26’s Liquid Glass did it ever “look good”. It’s certainly a marvel of engineering and technically impressive but just because something has cool refractions, reflections etc doesn’t make it desirable or useable.

René Fouquet:

So Apple is actually dialing forward the level on insanity on liquid glass rather than back, and things are less readable again.

There’s a Google event in a month, so…

Steve Troughton-Smith:

We have about six weeks to go until new iPhones have traditionally been revealed in September, and honestly right now I don’t see how they can land this plane.

Federico Viticci:

To be completely honest with y’all, I’m feeling the same sense of dread about iOS 26 as I did with Stage Manager in iPadOS 16. And it’s actually even worse, because design touches everything across platforms.
The more time passes, the more I feel like the entire idea of Liquid Glass needs to be scrapped. The material is bad; the few structural ideas they had are functionally worse than before.

Ryan Jones:

As always, everyone says “it’s a beta it won’t ship like this”… and it does.

Update (2025-07-25): Dan Moren:

It’s also worth noting that, with very few exceptions, all of the iOS 26 features that Apple demoed during its WWDC keynote this year are available, right now, in the public beta. The exceptions include the digital ID feature in Wallet that uses info from your passport and the age rating/content restriction updates in the App Store.

[…]

Controls now overlay content rather than sitting in designated toolbars or areas of the screen reserved for those controls, and are rendered in transparent glass that refracts and distorts the colors of whatever passes behind it. That’s impressive but also, at times, distracting: sometimes you see a distortion of text from what you’re reading within the UI, which is odd. Or, when scrolling past content that goes abruptly from light to dark, the buttons might similarly flip appearance from, say, black icons to white icons in a way that can feel jarring.

[…]

Safari’s reduced interface hides its commands in a plethora of pop-up menus, which leads to some oddities like two Share buttons.

[…]

Even in what seems like a modest update, there’s way more in iOS 26 than I can go through here.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

I think Apple made a change to UIDesignRequiresCompatibility that now reports the OS version as iOS 26, instead of iOS 19, so you might have to update all your codepaths if you were relying on that behavior.
This also tells me that Apple fully expects a lot of developers to opt-out of Liquid Glass come September, and it may no longer be ‘just’ a compatibility mode 😅

Ged Maheux:

Quick, which one of these Safari tabs in iOS 26 is the selected one?

John Gruber:

I think Apple’s in trouble here.

Jeff Johnson:

Just read the commit message to see how well Liquid Glass is going.

Mario Guzmán:

So, in OS 26 first-party apps, the “Done” button in navigation/toolbars no longer spells out “Done” but instead shows a checkmark and it is inside a circle of the app’s accent color.

I can’t get used to this being the “Done” button anymore. A checkmark feels like it has been historically more of an indication that some long running process has completed. It doesn’t feel right as a button for me to accept changes and complete my task.

Apple TV Captions

John Gruber (2024, Mastodon):

This made me think there has to be a better way to toggle captions than manually swiping and clicking on the Apple TV remote touchpad.
Turns out there are two better ways:
If you use the Control Center Apple TV remote control on your iPhone, there’s a dedicated “CC” button.
In tvOS, go to Settings → Accessibility → Accessibility Shortcut, and set it to “Closed Captions”. Now you can just triple-click the Menu/Back button on the remote to toggle captions. (On older Apple TV remotes, the button is labelled “Menu”; on the new remote, it’s labelled with a “<”.)

[…]

You can also toggle captions using Siri on the remote: “Turn on captions” or “Turn off captions” (or use the word “subtitles”). And the coolest feature: “What did he/she/they just say?”, which rewinds 15 seconds and temporarily turns on captions.

I meant to post this at the time. In the interim, Apple added a feature in tvOS 18 where pressing Back will automatically show subtitles until you return to the original play position.

Juli Clover:

Netflix today announced that it is introducing a new subtitle option that only shows subtitles for spoken dialogue, aimed at those who don't need captions, but prefer to watch movies and TV shows with the subtitles turned on.

According to Netflix, nearly half of all viewing hours on the streaming service in the U.S. happen with the subtitles or captions on, which is why it is debuting the new setting.

Some of this is probably for accessibility reasons or because of situations where you can’t turn on the audio. But, also, it seems like newer movies and shows are not mixed well.

Samuel Axon:

Traditional closed captions are still available, of course. Those are labeled “English CC” whereas this new option is simply labeled “English” (or whatever your preferred language is).
[…]
The performance style of actors in current TV shows and movies is more naturalistic and less elocutive than it once was, so characters are more likely to speak softly. Streaming services compress the audio more vigorously than is common in physical media, which can cause problems with intelligibility.

I’m not sure I buy this compression explanation. How much bandwidth could they be saving on audio compared with what the video’s using?

thaddeus:

And it would be amazing if they better aligned text appearing to when lines are delivered. I'm kind of annoyed when my reading is ahead of what's happening in the scene. 😬

Previously:

Update (2025-07-24): Craig Grannell:

Amazingly (and depressingly), BBC iPlayer on Apple TV still lacks subtitles, despite the organisation’s public service remit. Which must say a lot about how many people are using Apple TV in the UK.

Accessibility Audio Netflix Remote.app Siri tvOS tvOS 17 tvOS 18

12 Comments