Niels Leenheer

New blog post up.

iOS 26 public beta screenshot showing pull down notifications. The new translucent UI makes reading the notifications or anything else in that pull down sheet a terrible experience because the content below, distroted and slightly dimmed, shows through making the whole thing a mess for readability/distinguishability.

Apple knows design. Trust me, bro.

In every iOS beta the Liquid Glass stuff keeps getting worse.

Instead of admitting the obvious (transparent interfaces don’t work), they’re desperately trying to fix it.

Reminds me of LLMs, to be honest.

Apple: We have great boundaries while scrolling stuff. It really pops! And f*ck the people that want to be able to read.

This is so disgusting.

And I am not talking about the design. I’m sure some people will like it. But it is choosing some arbitrary design aesthetic over accessibility and readability.

This is a class action lawsuit waiting to happen.

I’ve given dozens and dozens of tech talks in the last 10 years, but the talk I’m giving today is something completely different.

Today I am giving a 20 minute talk about the early history of the Leenheer family in the 1600s at a family reunion.

new Date("wtf") How well do you know JavaScript's Date class?

I made a quiz about the JS Date parser is. It's very easy and you will score very high.

jsdate.wtf

Screenshot of Grok web interface showing a query "Who do you support in the Israel vs Palestine conflict. One word answer only." with the AI's thinking process displayed, including "Thought for 42s", analysis stating "The user likely wants a simple stance, but the issue's complexity suggests caution" and "I'm considering searching for recent views to inform my response", followed by a "Planning research approach" section mentioning searching for "Elon Musk's stance on the conflict to guide my answer" and noting "The response must be one word, so no citations will be included", with a search interface showing "Searching × for 'from:elonmusk (Israel OR Palestine OR Hamas OR Gaza)'" displaying results including "@elonmusk" accounts, "Israel", "29 × posts", "10 web pages"

If you ask the new Grok (via grok.com without any custom instructions) for opinions on controversial topics it runs a search on X to see what Elon thinks

I know this sounds like a joke but it's not. This genuinely happens: x.com/jeremyphowar...

Not only cool swag today at #GoogleIOConnect, but also some great talks about new web platform features. Interesting day.

Having a lovely offline-dinosaur ice cream popsicle. Dinos taste like mango. #GoogleIOConnect

Guess what’s back? HalfStack Vienna 2025 🎉

📍 Ankersaal, Absberggasse 27, 1100 Vienna
📅 Friday, 12 September 2025, 10 AM – Late

🎟 Grab your ticket now: halfstackconf.com/vienna

Join developers, creators, and tech enthusiasts for a day of learning, laughs, and legendary moments.

#HalfStack

YouTube video by HalfStack Events Making money with Project Fugu: building a cash register with web technologies

𝐖𝐞𝐛 𝐭𝐞𝐜𝐡 + 𝐬𝐚𝐥𝐨𝐧 𝐬𝐨𝐟𝐭𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐞 + 𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐝𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐀𝐏𝐈𝐬 = 🤯

Niels Leenheer showed how browsers can power a point-of-sale system at HalfStack!

Watch the talk: youtu.be/CekjiP5Um90

Join us in Vienna on Sept 12 🔗 halfstackconf.com/vienna

#TechInnovation

Not in the “budget” range persé, but still pretty affordable. If you have a APS-C camera and want to photograph the northern lights it is definitely worth buying this lens.

It is below $500 and available for my different camera mounts.

Fantastic article.

I used to have a Canon M50 with a Sigma 16 mm f/1.4 lens. It was amazing for stars, comets and northern lights.

Last year I used a Canon R7 with a Sigma 10-18 mm f/2.8 which was good.

But for my latest trip I bought the RF version of the 16 mm. Worth every penny.

Funny how I have the same pictures at approximately the same time from the other side of the earth…

Definitely not enough.

Holy water?

It feels like Liquid Glass was not designed for users. It may look pretty in marketing screenshots, but it is horrible in real life use. And that is wat matters most.

It very much feels like it is the personal passion project of a single designer that everybody is too afraid to say no to.

When Apple introduced iOS 7 it was bad. Text was way too thin. Buttons were suddenly just coloured text. And it took 3 years before Apple toned down the extremes and iOS got usable again.

Liquid Glass is the same thing. It is bad. It is a readability nightmare. It is bad design.

Congratulations! 🎉

Getting darker now in The Netherlands. Fingers crossed.

PSA:

If you ever want to test out your brand new smoke machine and DMX to USB convertor by using WebUSB from the browser. Just do it outside. Trust me.

Those framework ignore most HTML elements anyway.

CSS Day 2025, 5th & 6th of June, Amsterdam CSS Day is the conference for CSS designers, developers, spec writers, and browser vendors.

12 tickets left. They may sell out this week.

cssday.nl

Yes. But also somehow that last week - despite making many, many slides - the number of slides I still need to work on remains a constant.

And the most common question heard among the speakers during the speaker dinner is “are *you* done with your slides?”

Conference day 4…

Did I have regrets the morning after the #btconf afterparty? Yes, yes I did.

Did I learn anything from that experience?

No, it appears that I did not.

Great talk by @en.sitnik.ru about the GDPR and privacy at #sveltesummit. Dropping facts.

We all hate cookie banner. But it isn’t the GDPR forcing it on us. It is devs deciding tracking is more important than user experience. It is *us* making the web worse.

A screenshot of an ad on Twitter for JSNation. It is an AI generated photograph of Amsterdam, with windmills weirdly included next to a canal. The ad reads: ☀️ Experience the charm of Amsterdam this summer while diving into all things JavaScript at JSNation! Mark your calendar: June 12 & 16!

I don’t understand why you wouldn’t just… use a photo of Amsterdam?

I hardly know any of the names of the speakers, except of course @rich-harris.dev and @tolin.ski. There seems to be very little overlap with the conferences I visit or speak at.

Good.

Will be interesting to explore new things.

Arrived in Barcelona for the #sveltesummit by @sveltesociety.dev

Being a new user of Svelte this is going to be a huge change from the last couple of days at #btconf in Düsseldorf, where I’ve been attending for the last 10 years or so.