Duncan McAlester

One design system decision I was steadfast in denying was custom select elements. Spending the last few weeks filling out applications reinforced my decision. Most are truly awful; the fraction that aren’t are at best on par with the native element.

When it comes to UX and AI, I believe we’re still in the pre-mouse, pre-Doug Engelbart era of HCI. In part because for 50+ years we’ve been iterating on the same conceptual interaction models. Very few UX/HCI folks are versed in thinking across new vistas.

Now I want to create that web component.

I don’t know what I would use this for, but polling weather from shortcuts allows you to trigger an action based on distances, including light years.

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the new `sign()` feature can help here as well. This is super messy, but was something rattling around in my brain.

codepen.io/dmcalester/p...

Kudos to @duckduckgo.com for their migration of previous AI chats to their new domain. The copy is very easy to understand, the process is super simple and didn’t feel like a road-block in getting my task accomplished.

The Stickies app in macOS is still one of the best things Apple ever shipped. No cloud integration, a UI that’s so timeless it has escaped all the trends: aqua, brushed metal, liquid glass. It even has one of my favorite lost macOS features: Window Shade.

The Stickies app in macOS is still one of the best things Apple ever shipped. No cloud integration, a UI that’s so timeless it has escaped all the trends: aqua, brushed metal, liquid glass. It even has one of my favorite lost macOS features: Window Shade.

Tailscale

Love this inspector on Zed.dev’s theme builder for exploring tokens. The future of manually using tokens seems fuzzy in the age of AI, but for me, exposing tokens in context is way more useful than spec diagrams or token lists. https://zed.dev/theme-builder

Slack is the 5th largest app on my system. Bigger than Chrome, Safari, Garage Band, Pixelmator … crazy. Web app "Saved to Dock” is 200K.

Pro tip for anyone setting up a headless Mac for something like Clawdbot. Turn off Universal Control on the headless machine or you end up in an endless loop that freezes your main machine.

Automating my blinds to handle glare on my monitor has been great, except at least once a day I get a jump scare when the motor kicks in.

Has the used market for MacBooks completely dried up? In the past they’ve gone in days. I’ve had a good quality M2 Air on Craigslist, Nextdoor, et. al., and no movement for 6+ weeks.

Curiously WebKit release notes dedicate a whole section to MathML peer to other core technologies (HTML, CSS, SVG, DevTools). Always strikes me as odd it’s so prominently featured as it seems so niche. Though I get it semantically.

GitHub - tw93/Mole: 🐹 Deep clean and optimize your Mac. 🐹 Deep clean and optimize your Mac. Contribute to tw93/Mole development by creating an account on GitHub.

2 recent finds:
Mole - a CLI tool to find cruft. Great for those super old NPM/PIP directories github.com/tw93/Mole

PortKiller - for monitoring and killing all those servers I forget I spun up and can never remember the right lsof command github.com/productdevbo...

People would look at this flat design and never ascribe the skeuomorphic label, but it is as skeuomorphic as anything Apple did in the Jobs/Forstall era of iOS.

Parallel complaint(?) I wish the web platform would allow independently using 24 hour time irrespective of of the system clock.

💛 though I think you might be referring to AstroJS, I was the co-creator of AstroUXDS which was a DS for satellite operations applications. Though we did use AstroJS for the docs site.

Also in a former life I worked on 50+ Congressional web sites, it would have been so much easier had USWDS been around back then.

18F was one of our North Stars and aspirational targets when building Astro. The conviction was that design was more than just aesthetics. It was a tremendous honor when folks from the team reached out to us about how we approached Web Components in government environments.

GitHub - dmcalester/glare-reducer: Adjusting smart blinds based on your location and time Adjusting smart blinds based on your location and time - dmcalester/glare-reducer

I love how much I can use AI to solve paper-cuts. The glare on my monitor at certain times of the year is terrible. It’s something I could have done, but the time/effort calculus just wasn't worth it. A 10 minute Claude session and 15 minutes writing a Shortcut was.
github.com/dmcalester/g...

2026 Goals

Interop is easily my favorite standards effort of the modern era. Every year I eagerly await the announcement of focus areas and follow the progress almost too closely.

In an era where we’re fortunate to have some pretty good science fiction on TV (that isn’t just an action movie set in the future), Pantheon really stood out. I wish it were available on physical media, as it’s one I’d like to “own”.

I think I know the answer to this, but how is it that deli counter workers at grocery stores frequently don’t understand ounces? Not all of them, not even that frequently, but for a job that deals in weights between 1oz and 32oz, I would have thought it’d be a core concept.

Yes. Invariably I click one in error every day.

Prediction for front end dev. HTML/CSS/JS apps will be easier for LLMs to generate, scale & maintain. They’ll be more resilient & easier for human-in-the-loop fixes. Complex SPA apps will start to falter under increasingly complex code bases & a realization that “maybe this should just be an app”

Materials for a project

Materials have arrived for one of my sillier pursuits. Hoping to get some time to build a prototype this week.

Having a CompSci background or adjacency is an advantage working with LLMs right now, but it won’t be long before it’s an anchor.

I’m thinking of changing my email signature to "Duncan is a human and can make mistakes. Please double-check responses.”