BasicAppleGuy:
With macOS 26, Apple has announced a dramatically new look to their UI: Liquid Glass. Solid material icon elements give way to softer, shinier, glassier icons. The rounded rectangle became slightly more rounded, and Apple eliminated the ability for icon elements to extend beyond the icon rectangle (as seen in the current icons for GarageBand, Photo Booth, Dictionary, etc.).
With this release being one of the most dramatic visual overhauls of macOS's design, I wanted to begin a collection chronicling the evolution of the system icons over the years.
I linked to this in an update before, but I wanted to highlight it again since he’s been posting updates on social media and this post collects everything in one place. The new 26 icons will be GM very soon.
Previously:
Design History Icons Liquid Glass Mac macOS Tahoe 26
Maxdme124:
To be very clear this is not another post of “Breaking news malware exists on the internet” (or it may be depending on how you want to look at it) but I feel like it’s important that I leave a small PSA as I have recently seen an influx of seemingly convincing GitHub repo replicas for decently popular Mac apps. They are so similar that they almost fooled me. Thankfully I quickly spotted some anomalies and I nearly avoided getting infected. Unfortunately these are the sort of red flags I don’t expect an average Joe to know about. Which is why I’m explaining what the malware is, and how to spot it.
[…]
By far the easiest way to avoid this is to simply look for the app online and track down the original developer. This will let you kill 2 birds with one stone by A: Looking for the original source of the app and avoid impostors and B: See if the App or the developer had any previous reputation to begin with.
[…]
The second discrepancy is that the size of the fake app is ridiculously small. For instance the original app is 13mb in size while the fake one is less than 2mb. Now this is not necessarily a red flag (For example some viruses do the opposite and fill their dmg with a lot of useless data to make the file larger than what VirusTotal can handle.) but it’s still important to raise an eye brow for installers with suspiciously small sizes.
I recently had this problem with EagleFiler. Someone had made a decently convincing GitHub repo using the official icon and screenshots and similar marketing text. It ranked highly in Google searches, I guess because GitHub itself has lots of PageRank. The page tried to get users to paste a Base64-encoded snippet into Terminal, which would download and run a shell script that would prompt the user for a password and save it to a cleartext file.
GitHub has ways to report abuse, as well as DMCA and trademark violations, and they got rid of the repo promptly.
Previously:
Copyright Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) EagleFiler GitHub Google Search Mac Mac App macOS 15 Sequoia Malware Web
Mario Guzmán:
The following sections are general guidelines that describe fundamental Mac layout principles of center equalization, text and control alignment, appropriate use of white space, and visual balance. Following these guidelines will help you create functional and aesthetically pleasing windows that are easy for Mac users to understand and use.
[…]
When labels and controls are stacked in a group, they should line up with each other vertically. Note the right alignment of the colons for the main category labels and the left alignment of the checkboxes and radio buttons. The vertical alignment of the first control in each section is also first baseline aligned with the section title label.
A pet peeve of mine is that some apps put the section title labels in bold.
In such cases, you may use a label below the control with additional information as to how it will alter the application’s behavior.
- These labels are small-sized multi-line labels.
- The text color for these labels is “secondary text color” so they appear more muted than the actual control itself.
[…]
For any labels you add, they’re typically left aligned with the control they’re describing. However, for controls such as Checkboxes and Radio Buttons, they must be left-aligned with the label (title) of the control.
Previously:
Design Mac macOS Tahoe 26
Peter Hoskins & Lily Jamali (via Nick Heer):
A US federal court has told Google to pay $425m (£316.3m) for breaching users’ privacy by collecting data from millions of users even after they had turned off a tracking feature in their Google accounts.
The verdict comes after a group of users brought the case claiming Google accessed users’ mobile devices to collect, save and use their data, in violation of privacy assurances in its Web & App Activity setting.
They had been seeking more than $31bn in damages.
[…]
Google says that when users turn off Web & App Activity in their account, businesses using Google Analytics may still collect data about their use of sites and apps but that this information does not identify individual users and respects their privacy choices.
AP:
That means the total damages awarded in the five-year-old case works out to about $4 per device.
Rodriguez v. Google:
Plaintiffs in this lawsuit sued Google alleging that when someone turned off or “paused” Google’s Web & App Activity setting and/or supplemental Web & App Activity setting, Google lacked permission to collect, save, and use the data concerning their activity on non-Google apps that have incorporated certain Google software code into the apps (such as Uber, Venmo, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, etc.). Plaintiffs allege that regardless of whether Class Members had these settings paused or turned off, Google collected app activity data using certain code embedded within many non-Google apps. This embedded code includes the Firebase Software Development Kit and the Google Mobile Ads Software Development Kit, which are written and distributed by Google and placed on apps by third party developers who own the apps. Plaintiffs allege Google used this code to unlawfully access their devices and collect, save, and use data from their activity on non-Google apps for Google’s own benefit.
This seems kind of like the Incognito lawsuit. Technically, it doesn’t really make sense that flipping a switch on an Android phone would turn off Google Analytics across the Web and third-party apps. But some customers expected this, I guess because it’s all Google tech and because the wording in the settings screen was not clear:
Google’s employees recognize, internally and without disclosing this publicly, that
WAA is “not clear to users” (GOOG-RDGZ-00021182), “nebulous” (GOOG-RDGZ-00014578),
“not well understood” (GOOG-RDGZ-00020706), “completely broken” (GOOG-RDGZ-
00130745 at -46) and “confuses users” (GOOG-RDGZ-00015004), where people “don’t know
what WAA means” (GOOG-RDGZ-00021184) and Google’s promise of control is “just not true”
(GOOG-RDGZ-00020680). Google employees accordingly describe WAA as a “terrible control”
(GOOG-RDGZ-00130416) and a “loser” (GOOG-RDGZ-00144760), and lament how “Web &
App Activity is the worst name ever” (GOOG-RDGZ-00089546).
It sounds to me like the switch did work in the sense that it did what it could reasonably do at the system level, but this was poorly explained and didn’t do as much as users wanted. In comparison, the Apple lawsuits are about how turning off a system-wide “share analytics” switch did not prevent system apps from sending personally identifiable data to Apple. This seems more directly bad, although Google is surely collecting more data overall.
Previously:
Android Google Google Analytics Lawsuit Legal Privacy
