Fran

Little gecko

📷 Crossed some beautiful places this summer on the way to Italy.

iamfran.com/photos/2025-...

Ironic: as LLMs make writing much easier, I am finding not more, but less interesting and novel things to read online.

And so I keep paying more attention to the fewer people who still write their original thoughts (without LLMs - you can tell how repetitive it gets with them)

Happy Tula

View of the Amsterdam river (Ij) withe the city centre on the horizon.

Sunset in Amsterdam, just a couple of days ago.

#photography #landscapephotography #netherlands

Spent a beautiful week hiking and bouldering in the Alps. This is what life should be…

“I took a speed reading course once, and was able to go through ‘War and Peace’ in 20 minutes. It’s about Russia.”
– Woody Allen

A minimalistic drawing of my dog sleeping like a doughnut

Sleepy Tula

“Sorry mate, it’s the law”

A Roman-style porch in Berlin, people walking are barely visible, they appear blurred as in movement

The interior of a museum in London. Moving people appear blurred, fading in the background and allowing for still objects to be more visible.

A detail of King Cross’ station in London. Moving people appear blurred, fading in the background and allowing for still objects to be more visible.

Always fun to use Spectre by @halideapp.bsky.social. Can’t suggest it enough, especially when visiting touristy places.

Literally begging you to post about Just Some Stuff. We will see the news I absolutely promise. Twenty people will repost the same exact thing about the news. Only you can post about a turtle you saw

Yeah, and the damage it has done to UX reputation. In the end “people use it anyway, every day”, which means inconsistencies, shitty user flows, and chaotic releases are not an issue…

If I owned a company one of the benefits listed in the employee’s handbook would be:

“You don’t have to use Microsoft 365 suite”

Something feels wrong...

Today, I wrote for 12 hours in what could have been 12 separate blog posts. But instead, it’s one comprehensive post that covers what I think about Apple design right now.

It’s long. And there’s audio.

Rose-Gold-Tinted Liquid Glasses
🔗 lmnt.me/blog/rose-go...

I fell you... I've been following your post for a while using RSS and I'll keep doing so that way.

Maybe consider adding a "Reply via email" at the bottom of every post so people can engage with you that way.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure they'll fix it. If you look at the one on iPadOS it looks much more readable 👇

Liquid Glass - The start of a new design language | Fran's Realm Or is it 'just a Winamp skin'?

✍️ Liquid Glass - The start of a new design language

Let’s set aside the fancy, glassy visuals for a moment and focus on core UI elements: buttons, inputs, and menus.

The boundaries between components are eroding, fluidly adapting to the context.

iamfran.com/blog/liquid-...

#wwdc25 #apple

The same happens on the navigation bar.

This happens only when drag and dropping the toggle button. If you just click there’s no glass animation.

It’s a super nice animation that no one will ever see, but brings consistency and adds a nice touch to the UI.

Maybe I’m the only person in the world, but I really liked how gestures worked on my small iPad Air and now Apple killed basically all of them and this new windowed OS is not as smooth to control (yet).

Drag and dropping apps from the dock doesn’t add them side-by-side anymore ☹️

On iPhone you can trigger this gorgeous effect by dragging the selector when navigating between pages instead of clicking on the pages (but who would do that?)

The best way to appreciate Liquid Glass is by using an iPad with a mouse. The interactions are incredibly satisfying.

Obviously these hover effects don't work on iPhone (unless you drag and drop the selector) and on macOS they are toned down a lot.

Interested to see how consistent this will be.

After playing around with the betas on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, I'm really digging more and more of these interactions. Once they start refining and applying what's working on what device to another this will be really nice!

E.g. The control centre on iPadOS looks a lot better than the one on iOS

Before yesterday, Apple taught us that the interface doesn’t need to attract any unnecessary attention.

So, what has changed? Why was it necessary to modify something that wasn’t broken? And why did it need to be applied everywhere?

Apple WWDC 2025 - Designing personality | Fran's Realm Content vs design

WWDC 25 - Designing personality

I tried to explain my concerns with Liquid Glass. And no, it's not about accessibility. It's about how it relates to content, and what it means changing this relationship.

iamfran.com/blog/wwdc-2025

We have decided to increase your membership cost by 15% so we can keep adding features you don't use, like podcasts, audiobooks and videos in our audio app. With love, Spotify

As if people need money to despise him…

The most obvious lesson to draw from the leaked Signal chat is that these people really are morons. It's not a public act, it's not a schtick, there's not some secret back room where they drop the facade. They are genuinely stupid, incompetent people.

It’s still wild to me that the guy that owns the column on the right has convinced the people who collectively own the column on the left is wasting government money and has managed to turn everyday Americans against each other.