Marcin Wichary:
The first field is not focused, so you cannot start typing the number after opening this window. You need to immediately move your hand to the mouse.
If you click on any field, the value is not pre-selected, so you cannot start typing a new number then.
[…]
Clicking on parts of the input field doesn’t bring it into focus even though the hover state promises it. (Discrepancies between hover and focus handling are a horrible new thing I’m starting to see more in recent interfaces.)
[…]
Simply backspacing through the field shows a crude error modal and – to add a second injury to the first injury – the dialog removes focus from the field!
What’s going on at Adobe? As he says, “all those transgressions are solved problems”—figured out by Adobe itself decades ago.
Marc Edwards:
This is a great post by @mwichary, demonstrating how Adobe’s apps are decaying. I have a couple to add to the pile for the new canvas window: It now accepts fractional pixels and shouldn’t, nudging increases or decreases by 0.01 pixels, and shift-nudging changes the value by 0.1 pixels.
Cabel Sasser:
there is no jumpscare quite like a “oh my god adobe updated the hue/saturation panel for the first time since 1978” jumpscare
Jason Snell:
I have been using Photoshop since John Sculley was the CEO of Apple. Longtime users can be brutally resistant to change, but I would like to think that I remain open-minded. One can’t have used Photoshop for more than three decades without having adapted to change and found utility in the new features Adobe has added over the years. I’ve used generative fill. I’ve used AI-enhanced edge detection. I’m hip and with it.
But, as Wichary detected, what Adobe is doing with the Modern User Interface is not to make a new, improved, modern interface. Adobe’s own description gives it away: It’s a hammering of all of Adobe’s user interfaces so they look alike, across Creative Cloud. It’s a “multi-platform design system,” which means in addition to Adobe being committed to “modernizing” Photoshop by making it look like Premiere, it’s also going to make it look the same on the Mac as Windows.
Already, Photoshop desperately wants to run in single-window mode, with multiple documents opening in a single uberwindow—in other words, the stink of Windows. Fortunately, you can turn that feature off, and I have.
[…]
That all said, of course, this decision could benefit Photoshop users, because Adobe could put in the work to make the app better while also fulfilling its own corporate goals of homogeneity.
Ha ha ha. Sorry. I tried to write that with a straight face.
Alejandro Romano:
We’re talking about Adobe, though. They sure had the resources, the talent, and the runway to manage that transition. They just chose not to. Priorities were different.
Remember Creative Cloud? Of course you do. We all do. It’s still with us.
Who likes it? No one.
One of the most insulting moves it enabled them to do is to hit people who dared to cancel their subscription with surprising, insane fees for trying to leave. What about that? Could you respect a company that treats their users like that? Most of them have supported and cheered them on for decades. It’s gotten to the point where, if you pirated their software, you would have a better experience.
[…]
They came up with the subscription model. It ended the last financial incentive to ship better software. They could cut down the cost of innovation, while charging customers more for the same. Win-win.
Previously:
Update (2026-05-01): Nick Heer:
If you do a little poking around in Adobe’s application bundles, a key reason for the jankiness of these user interfaces becomes apparent: it is because they are little webpages. These dialog boxes are HTML files that reference a chunky CSS file and oodles of JavaScript, and appear to be built with React.
This is loathsome.
There are people out there who will insist it is unfair to blame the tools and that bad user interfaces can be built in entirely native languages, too, which is true. Also, Adobe’s interface has always been unique and not quite at home on either MacOS or Windows. Maybe it really is possible to build a web app that feels platform native. But I have never used one — not once — and for this mess to be increasingly used in the industry-standard professional suite of creative tools is maddening.
[…]
I was going to write about how this stuff should have been tried with people who actually use Adobe’s apps in a high-pressure environment, but I am sure it was and, also, it does not matter. Wichary has it right. These are fundamental principles of user interface design that Adobe is ignoring because its internal tooling has taken precedence.
Previously:
Update (2026-05-04): Louie Mantia:
Photoshop “redesigned” the Actions panel, one of the most fundamental features of Photoshop. The default tab is “Essentials” which I never use. “Yours” is my actions. Of course they have a setting for “Classic” mode, which is what I do for effectively every Photoshop feature that gets redesigned.
However— they also changed the behavior. Undo/redo is for the entire action rather than individual steps of an action. Not helpful! So, also uncheck “create a single history state.”
Update (2026-05-05): John Gruber (Mastodon):
The before-and-after screenshots look like examples from a lecture on user interface design — if you swap them around make the new ones “before” and the old ones “after”. Better balance, better focus behavior, appropriate platform-native typography.
Eric Peacock:
Years ago the “hold option to toggle the cancel button to reset” stopped working in a bunch of effect or adjustment dialogs — like nothing would reset when the toggle was clicked.
I may-or-may-not have reported that bug at some point, but it wasn’t acknowledged or fixed for years after it initially frustrated me.
John Gruber:
You have to go back to the 1990s and classic Mac OS, but Adobe’s best apps used to have exemplary native UIs. Apps like Photoshop helped push the state of the art in Mac UI forward. Tabbed palettes were a revelation.
Update (2026-05-06): John Gruber:
It feels like the world of software is bifurcating quality-wise. This whole thing about Adobe’s new craptacular “modern” UI language (a.k.a. “Spectrum”) exemplifies one side of that bifurcation — the bad-and-getting-worse side. Software that is the product not just of an ignorance of long-established principles of interaction design, but of a willful disdain for those principles. What Adobe is now shipping is just inexplicably bad UI, ignoring literally decades of great work and long-mastered concepts — a lot of which work was pioneered by Adobe itself!
The whole thing with MacOS 26 Tahoe is similar. […] Spectrum is where Tahoe suggests that MacOS was headed under Alan Dye’s leadership: cross-platform sameness for the sake of sameness, with a complete disregard for longstanding platform nuances and idioms.
[…]
The other side of the software fork is not deserted. It’s just populated, more than ever, by the products of small independent developers who obsess, first and foremost, over quality and artistic vision.
Update (2026-05-07): See also: Hacker News.
Marco Arment:
Then re-read the last two paragraphs, replacing “Adobe” with “Apple”.
MontagFTB:
I am Foster Brereton and Principal Scientist for this UI effort. Suffice it to say, the article and this thread have had their impact on the people behind the software. We are aware we got a lot of things wrong. As the primary technical lead on the UI migration, a lot of the implementation details ultimately fall up to me.
Two things I can tell you: the engineering team does care about Photoshop (I’ve been on the team more than 15 years for a reason) and this migration is far from over for us.
These sharp edges are acknowledged, and we are working on them. Some of them are already addressed.
I know this will be of little comfort to some. But to the rest, we are still here.
Update (2026-05-13): Marcin Wichary:
Oh, and when I say “broken windows,” I’m not just being cute. Here’s an example of Photoshop’s “explore” halo that occasionally appears on top of another app just because I have Photoshop open underneath. And, there is nothing I can do in Photoshop to get rid of it[…]
Adobe Adobe Creative Cloud Adobe Photoshop App Subscriptions Design Mac Mac App macOS Tahoe 26 React Native
Simon Willison (Hacker News):
Zig has one of the most stringent anti-LLM policies of any major open source project:
No LLMs for issues.
No LLMs for pull requests.
No LLMs for comments on the bug tracker, including translation. English is encouraged, but not required. You are welcome to post in your native language and rely on others to have their own translation tools of choice to interpret your words.
The most prominent project written in Zig may be the Bun JavaScript runtime, which was acquired by Anthropic in December 2025 and, unsurprisingly, makes heavy use of AI assistance.
Loris Cro:
In successful open source projects you eventually reach a point where you start getting more PRs than what you’re capable of processing. Given what I mentioned so far, it would make sense to stop accepting imperfect PRs in order to maximize ROI from your work, but that’s not what we do in the Zig project. Instead, we try our best to help new contributors to get their work in, even if they need some help getting there. We don’t do this just because it’s the “right” thing to do, but also because it’s the smart thing to do.
Contributing to an open source project is an iterated game and the majority of the value that a contributor can bring to a project lies in the later iterations. In other words, you initially invest some energy (i.e. place a bet) to onboard a new contributor, and you hope that later on that relationship starts paying you back as the contributor becomes more trusted and prolific.
The reason I call it “contributor poker” is because, just like people say about the actual card game, “you play the person, not the cards”. In contributor poker, you bet on the contributor, not on the contents of their first PR.
Simon Willison:
LLM assistance breaks that completely. It doesn't matter if the LLM helps you submit a perfect PR to Zig - the time the Zig team spends reviewing your work does nothing to help them add new, confident, trustworthy contributors to their overall project.
Previously:
Artificial Intelligence Open-source Software Programming Zig Programming Language
Jason Snell:
From the first time I put on the Vision Pro, I never could get Optic ID to work quite right. I couldn’t set it up to work for the longest time, and when I finally did, using it to unlock the device only worked sporadically.
[…]
Worse, though, is that I also wasn’t offered other light shields to compare and contrast, or asked questions about my fit. I didn’t get the sense that the person I was working with knew anything about fitting someone properly. The experience was very friendly, but also quite underwhelming. It’s hard for me to blame an Apple employee for being poorly trained. I blame his employers.
[…]
I’m not sure what led to Apple’s decision to focus on hard-sell demos (for a pricey 1.0 product!) while seemingly not giving the proper attention to fitting the Vision Pro, but I’ve got a few guesses. Clearly the company decided to put its faith in an app that scans your face in order to find the right fit, and perhaps that was misguided. It’s a good start, but it’s not going to be enough on its own—take it from the guy who got two different results from the app.
John Gruber:
This seems like it could and should have been so much simpler. Why not have 4 lights instead of one, representing 25/50/75/100 percent charge levels? It seems like madness that green means “charged to capacity” when plugged in, but “50% or higher” when not. That’s a big difference!
Kyle Barr (Hacker News):
Those still holding on to their Apple Vision Pros may remain in a rather exclusive club throughout this year. Market research shows that sales for Apple’s first big, expensive headset will remain low in 2024. The latest reports from those keeping tabs on the Cupertino, California company say AVP will have dropped off 75% by the end of August. The true test for Apple’s spatial dreams may rest on the rumored (slightly) cheaper headset.
Juli Clover:
Apple has all but given up on the Vision Pro after the [not cheaper] M5 model failed to revitalize interest in the device, MacRumors has learned. Apple updated the Vision Pro with a faster M5 chip and a more comfortable band in October 2025, but there were no other hardware changes, and consumers still weren't interested.
[…]
Insider sources told MacRumors that Apple has received an unusually high percentage of returns, far exceeding any other modern Apple product.
[…]
Apple has apparently stopped work on the Vision Pro and the Vision Pro team has been redistributed to other teams within Apple.
Steve Streza:
It’s very funny that for Vision Pro, an insanely expensive and uncomfortable device notoriously light on content and use cases, Apple was banking on a minor hardware refresh to save it, and was surprised it didn’t. Just comical levels of being out of touch on your product.
Óscar Morales Vivó:
Apple has, historically, had a severe problem building things to a price. The Vision Pro was an extreme example where it would seem they couldn’t say no to anything the execs thought about.
The other major issue I see with it is the same that the iPad Pro has, where it pretends to be a productivity tool but Apple gets in the way of third parties making it so. Notably the iPad Pro is another product that doesn’t sell much and might stay alive mostly off Apple execs liking it.
I’ve had one since December and routinely use it, IMO there’s more room for improvement on the software than you seem to imply and fortunately for me I can wear it for quite a while without discomfort.
The hope would be that Apple sticks to it and v2 actually works as a product (far from the first time with Apple stuff anyway). There’s flashes of greatness here but Apple needs to get off its own way both on software and hardware for it to happen.
Amy Worrall:
They could have gone one of two ways: make it a cheap accessory, or make it a full computing platform with developer interest and not locked down. They managed neither.
Nikhil Nigade:
I don’t believe the Vision Pro is going away anywhere anytime soon. It literally drove the recent UI overhaul for OS26 releases.
It could totally be the stepping stone to the “Air Glasses” as Juli claims in the article, but I don’t think it’s all that gloomy yet for the Vision series of devices.
Andrew Leland:
Still, my brief experience with the AVP allowed me to imagine a future version where, for instance, the price comes down, Apple opens up the front-facing cameras to developers, and what is already a powerful low-vision device could become the ultimate tool for blind and low-vision people. When I play the complicated tabletop games my son adores, and press a game’s card to my nose to read it, I often find myself wishing I could tap on the blocks of indecipherable text the way I can with a paragraph of text on my iPhone and hear it read aloud. It’s easy to imagine a non-distant future where I could wear a fourth-gen AVP, leveraging whatever comes after GPT4o, and tap one of the game cards with my finger, and hear a readout of the text printed there, along with a description of whatever illustration is on the card, too. If I preferred to use my residual vision, I might casually use two fingers to zoom in on the card (or my son’s face) the way you’d enlarge a photo on your iPhone.
Dan Moren:
I’m going to say that I’m skeptical of this pronouncement. And I’m not the only one: Jonathan Wight, who worked in Apple’s AR/VR group until 2022, disputed the report on Mastodon, and that jibes with what I’ve heard privately.
[…]
Heck, if Apple really was killing the Vision Pro, why would it update it in the first place?
[…]
Look, it’s pretty clear that there are lots of other projects at Apple that are higher priority than the Vision Pro right now. That work on Siri is clearly incredibly significant, especially in light of promises that are now two years old and still haven’t shipped. Rockwell was essentially parachuted into the Siri role as a fixer: it’s no surprise that he would draw from a trusted pool of his reports to get the job done.
Likewise, Apple has reportedly accelerated work on its smart glasses product, mounting a somewhat late challenge to products from Meta and, soon, Samsung. Again, if Apple is prioritizing getting that product out the door, it’s not hard to imagine that the company might shift personnel to work on it—especially if we’re talking personnel who have experience with augmented reality.
Steve Troughton-Smith:
The teams that were necessary to invent this thing (something like 1500 people worked on Vision Pro?) are no longer necessary. The OS is now under the purview of Apple’s existing software teams. And if there’s no third-gen model in development at the moment, all of the R&D attention can go towards the Siri glasses.
[…]
The Vision Pro is the ‘Mac Pro’ of the face-computer category, like it or not (and I don’t mean that it should go away, not until there are lower-end models that outperform it). If it gets updated more often than once every 6 years, like Mac Pro, it would be lucky.
[…]
Apple’s Vision Pro developer story has been bad vibes all round, from the very start. A lot of people have felt burned, even burnt out, with trying to build for this platform. Apple arrived with arrogance and just assumed everybody would jump with them, despite burning bridges with developers for years through their fights against Epic and the EU, among other things. I’ve talked to VR game developers who met with Mike Rockwell and came away thinking ‘I want nothing to do with these people’.
Priority no 1 under new leadership at Apple should be to fix all of this stuff: reinstate Epic on all App Stores, partner with them on bringing Unreal Engine (even Unreal Editor) to Vision Pro, stop fighting EU and antitrust legislation so viciously, and do dev outreach — bring third parties on board, make them feel good about it. The software can handle itself, but the vibes need major work.
Previously:
Update (2026-05-01): Mark Gurman:
Apple broke up the Vision Products Group a year ago, splitting the team across software engineering and hardware engineering. Then, Apple re-assigned much of the Vision Pro software team to Siri and the hardware team to smart glasses.
John Gruber (Mastodon):
This report comes as news to everyone at Apple working in the Vision Product Group (VPG). Nothing about the future of the platform has changed recently.
[…]
As for poor sales, I think it’s unquestionable that Vision Pro sales — and general enthusiasm — have been a disappointment. What momentum they had out of the gate has seemingly petered out. But the optimistic scenario inside Apple was not all that high. The best-case scenario was surely a bigger number of units than they’ve actually sold, but not that much more.
[…]
That speed bump in October was not intended to make a huge difference. It was just a signal that they’re still at it.
[…]
There are, I believe, as many people at Apple working on VisionOS software and immersive content today as there ever have been. It’s full steam ahead. […] I know for a fact that it is not true that the teams working on the Vision platform have “been redistributed to other teams within Apple.”
Mark Gurman:
Apple breaking up VPG doesn’t mean visionOS is going away. It means they put the OS team under Apple software and the HW team under Apple hardware. Big road map ahead of non-display + AR glasses and if it makes sense in the future, new headset.
Dan Moren:
I have no trouble believing that Vision Pro development is on the back burner. By all accounts the technology to get to the device that Apple really wants to make just isn’t here yet, and isn’t expected to be anytime soon. Could that mean the Vision Pro will eventually be killed? Absolutely. But not only is the Vision Pro still a genuinely technologically impressive device, but everything Apple developed for it will almost certainly inform future products—especially if the company is still trying to ultimately make a lighter pair of augmented reality glasses. The Vision Pro is fine where it is: even the original M2 model is still an incredibly capable device. Apple can continue as it’s doing now: building up a library of content for the device and working on pushing the envelope of its software capabilities.
Matt Ronge:
A product on ice is a cancelled product, it’s only a matter of time…
Accessibility Apple Vision Pro Liquid Glass Rumor Sunset visionOS visionOS 26
Tim Hardwick:
On Tuesday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed an earlier decision letting Apple keep its current zero-fee link-out commission structure in place while it appeals to the Supreme Court. The reversal means Apple now has to return to a lower court to work out what fees it can charge developers who steer customers to outside payment options.
[…]
The three-judge panel granted Epic’s motion for reconsideration. The judges said Apple hadn’t shown that the Supreme Court was likely to take the case, and pointed out that the high court already chose not to hear Apple’s challenges once back in 2024. They also rejected Apple’s claim that being forced into lower-court hearings would cause real harm.
Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney shared the news in a post on X, adding that “Apple’s delaying tactics have come to an end!”
Marcus Mendes:
You can read the full document[…]
Previously:
Antitrust App Store Apple Epic Games External iOS Payments Fortnite In-App Purchase iOS iOS 26 iOS App Lawsuit Legal
