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iPhone and OS 26 Reviews Off The Beaten Track
New iPhones have been released, are being delivered, and I assume being used. Some of the usual sources have already reviewed the devices and the new operating systems and I’m guessing you’ve seen many of those.
I’m enjoying reading reviews that are sort of off of the beaten track, assuming the Internet has one of those, and thought I’d link to a few of them.
First up Jason McFadden of Jason Journals talks about his experiences and impressions after installing OS 26 on several older devices. Good read.
Next up is Sebastian de With’s look at the iPhone 17 Pro cameras. Sebastian is one of the developers of the team Lux that developed the Halide camera app for the iPhone.
Olivia Lipski writing for Good HouseKeeping says I’m a Tech Reporter and a Mom. Here’s My Honest Review of the iPhone Air.
And finally Rakhim Davlekali has written a review of macOS in reverse starting with the now current Tahoe and going backwards through time. Benjamin Button Reviews macOS is worth a read for a few laughs.
I still think it’s early for any real judgements to be made about the new devices and new operating systems. But the links above are worth a look.
You can also find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.
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Jimmy Kimmel’s Return: Grace and Strength
Jimmy Kimmel returned to the air in some places last night. In my opinion, he did so with grace and with strength.
He certainly didn’t give any ground as a comedian, continuing to needle the Trump administration and the two-faced chair of the FCC, Brendan Carr. But he also showed a great deal of grace given the moments he and we have all been through since this episode of life under a crazy emperor with no clothes.
I’m linking to the video above with his opening monologue, because one way on the other the moment is a piece of broadcast and cultural history. The optimist in me hopes it will prove to be bigger than that, perhaps a turning point. The realist in me thinks we’re due for some sequels.
Here’s hoping people and the cowardly CEOs have learned a lesson or two before the next sequel is given a green light. I’m not holding my breath on the latter. I have more hope for the former.
You can also find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.
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Just Because
Snapped this shot yesterday and thought I’d share it before everything goes to seed.
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Disney Brings Back Jimmy Kimmel On Tuesday
In what seems like a reversal Disney is announcing that Jimmy Kimmel will be returning to the air on Tuesday night. That said, don’t count your resurrected comedians before the reruns are syndicated.
All we know is that there will be a spectacle on Tuesday night and in the run up to it. And certainly after the show is over. I’m sure whatever reactions happen in the next 48 hours or so will equal the polarized reactions we’ve already seen. Celebrities have been signing petitions and urging folks to cancel subscriptions, stay away from the theme parks and off of the cruise ships. Conservative politicians have been saying this is a bridge too far.Of course the MAGAts have been celebrating in the wake of Kimmel’s suspension and gloating in the thuggish way it was done. I’m sure there will be teeth gnashing and hair pulling in the run up to the show. I’m also sure the writer’s room will be quite a show into and of itself.
No one comes out of this looking like anything other than bad. With the possible exception of Kimmel.
Here’s Disney’s statement:
“Last Wednesday, we made the decision to suspend production on the show to avoid further inflaming a tense situation at an emotional moment for our country.
“It is a decision we made because we felt some of the comments were ill-timed and thus insensitive.
“We have spent the last days having thoughtful conversations with Jimmy, and after those conversations, we reached the decision to return the show on Tuesday.”
Of course all eyes and ears will be on what Kimmel has to say on the show Tuesday. Perhaps he’ll reveal some of the names on the Epstein list.
Whatever happens it is just another page in this dark moment we’re living through. And while the entire episode is certainly serious on many fronts, I’m guessing there are more than a few laughs to be had. The only question in the end is at whose expense.
You can also find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.
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Sunday Morning Reading
Ok, so I lied last week when I said Sunday Morning Reading would be back this week. We’re still on hiatus because of travels and this weekend more fun ensued than we planned for. This time we’re in Memphis to hang out with The Lehman Trilogy gang and see two of them in a prodution of Hamlet.
To be honest, I could have cranked out a post, but we’re just having too much of a good time hanging together and celebrating being in each other’s company for me to set aside the time and brain space to do so.
Sunday Morning Reading will be back next week. No lie this time.
If you’re interested in just what the heck Sunday Morning Reading is all about you can read more about the origins of Sunday Morning Reading here. If you’d like more click on the Sunday Morning Reading link in the category column to check out what’s been shared on Sunday’s past. You can also find more of my writings on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome.
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Brothers On Stage
When our team assembled for The Lehman Trilogy some time ago, the three actors, John Maness, Michael Gravois, and Kevar Maffitt and I never knew that expereince would help us build such a strong, ongoing bond. Well it did.
Last night I had the great pleasure to watch two of the brothers in the Theatre Memphis production of Hamlet, featuring Kevar Maffitt as the Dane, and John Maness as Claudius. I did so sitting along side the third brother Michael Gravois.
Let’s just say this. Kevar climbed the mountain that is portraying Hamlet brilliantly, captured the play and the audience and took us for quite a ride. Kudos to Kevar and to John, who was also excellent as Claudius, for their excellent work in this oh, so difficult play and oh, so difficult challenge for actors.
We sat towards the back of the house so tha we would not become distrations during the many direct address monologues in the show. That said, the director gave Kevar the freedom to move about the house in those soliloquies and he chose to come up the stadium seating aisle and deliver the end of the famous “to be or not to be” monologue directly to Michael and I.
It was quite a moment among brothers. The bond continues.
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Add Satire to the List of the Dead
The list of the things killed by this soul-less adminstration and it’s bloodthirsty allies keeps growing.
In the wake of the Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel silencing, satire now joins Congress, The Rule of Law, Irony, Facts, The Constitution, Academic Institutions, Law firms, Religion, the Media, corporate titans, health care, women’s rights…the list just keeps growing.
At this rate the graveyards are filling up and the Grim Reaper will be the only one hiring soon enough.
Eventually they will run out of targets. You could argue that the way they are turning on each other over the Epstein files and a few other things they are fast approaching that point.
I just wish that pace of cannibalism would speed up.
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The Cowards and Greedy Captains of Industry
Once upon a time things like free speech, freedom of expression, freedom of the press were considered hallmarks of what America stood for. That feels more and more like a fairy tale. The folks in control of the government keep ripping their claws into social and political fabric and turning America into some weird fascist and cultish state that worships a convicted felon and child rapist.
The latest outrageous move of the Trump administration is threatening ABC to take late night comedy host Jimmy Kimmel off of the air “indefinitely.” It’s a political move and a business move. It’s also a mob move.
Disney, the pseudo-family corporate parent of ABC, Disney made the move after one of the ABC affiliates, Nexstar Media said it was so offended by Kimmel’s comments about the recent shooting of Charlie Kirk that it would pre-empt the show on its stations.
Here’s the fun part. Nexstar is trying to expand its stable of channels and that requires FCC approval. You don’t need a crayon to draw your own conclusions because the thugs in charge are so transparent with their thuggery.
Day by day we’re watching what used to be called the Captains of Industry, academia, and the media drive their boats into what they presume is the safe harbor under Trump’s protection. That harbor is getting so crowded that no one is going to be able to sail out again. Forget the ship of state, the ships of commerce are running themselves aground. This will continue because once ground is given, the bully keeps taking. It’s a tale told too well.
This feels like a yet another power move and of course it requires power to pull off. But it’s actually the move of cowards who realize they are despised and have skin so thin that they can’t take a punch line from a so-so comic. It also requires what we once thought of strong business leaders to show their true colors as cowards. Captains of Cowardice fits more today than the former sobriquet of Captains of Industry.
Another president in another time, Lyndon Johnson, once said about the comedic and satiric criticism tossed at him by the Smothers Brothers.
“It is part of the price of leadership of this great and free nation to be the target of clever satirists. You have given the gift of laughter to our people. May we never grow so somber or self-important that we fail to appreciate the humor in our lives.”
Don’t get me wrong. LBJ was pissed. But he was man enough to rise above it, at least publicly. Those were tumultuous times then as well. These times are becoming not only tumultuous, but tortuous because of the daily drip of news like this.
You can also find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.
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A Constitution Day Like No Other
Today, September 17 in the U.S. is Constitution and Citizenship Day in the U.S. It marks the observance of the day that delegates to the Constitutional Convention signed the document, revered for almost two and half centuries, and now, in my opinion, seriously in danger of being stripped of its meaning by those only adhering to its principles when its convenient and shredding them when it’s not.
Tumultuous times today, but there were also tumultuous in the run up to reaching the moment that saw the Constitution adopted. That’s well known and also conveniently forgotten. Until a piece of it needs cherry picking to beat a point home.
It was never a perfect document. It was never intended to be. That’s why there’s an amendment clause in Article V. But amendments to the document require enormous amounts of toil and compromise, are hard to come by, and frankly that process can’t work when you live in a world without principle.
I may not have agreed with some of the things left out of the original document or its later amendments, and perhaps I’m naive, but I do happen to believe that those who argued over what our governing document should be at the time at least had principles that they believed in as opposed to those today who only seem to believe in what’s best for themselves and not the entire body politic.
We talk all the time about the founders who built this thing. It’s a damn shame we’re consumed with talking about a real estate developer who is overseeing its destruction.
You can also find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.
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OS 26 First Impressions
Bubbles. My grandkids love bubbles. It’s a kid’s delight. Apparently bubbles also delight some Apple designers. My first impression of the look of iOS 26 on the iPhone was bubbles.
I watched the OS 26 round of operating system betas over the summer as things evolved and have now installed the first release on all my devices. I’ve seen and heard the reactions so I was reasonably prepared for what would happen once the updates occurred. These are some first impressions after taking a look.
Liquid Glass
I’m not putting down bubbles. Bubbles are fun, whimsical, and joyful. But my overwhelming impression on the iPhone 16 Pro with iOS 26 installed was that the Liquid Glass design language, (that supposedly isn’t a design language,) felt very bubbly and child-like. To my eye I associate it more with bubbles than I do glass, liquid or not.
I also thinks Liquid Glass looks and feels better on the iPad Pro than it does on the iPhone. There’s more space for the chunkier, bubblier UI elements to float around. By and large things look cleaner on the iPad.
On the Mac, Apple didn’t go quite as far with Liquid Glass as they did with the iPhone and iPad regarding transparency and bubbly things, but there is still a more cartoonish feel to macOS 26 than the previous version. I think most of that is due to the rounded corners, rounded buttons and tab bars. I will say in this early going, I miss what I felt was a cleaner design in Sequoia on the Mac than what I see in this early going with Tahoe.
Bubbles are also messy things. Messier than glass in solid form certainly. Perhaps applying liquid properties to this glass like interface provides a license to keep things messier. That’s certainly true in some cases on the iPhone. For example, in the Phone app the reflective (or is it refractive) qualities around the buttons make it feel like light is leaking through a misapplied sticker than I think was the intent.
On both the iPad and the iPhone you’ll have to be careful what you choose for a wallpaper, because that same light leaking through means photos that have many colors or light contrasts within them appear more distracting than pleasing. (I like to use my own photography for wallpapers).
The issues of legibility have been discussed quite a bit over the summer, and I don’t think Apple has a complete solution for that yet when it comes to complex backgrounds, other than seemingly to force users to make simpler choices with wallpaper backgrounds. In early use, I think what we see on iPhone and iPad completely renders useless the statement of letting your content shine through. It might bleed through, but if it shines it does so in a distracting manner.
Here’s an example of one of my Home Screens that I think makes things look more bubbly than Liquid Glassy, especially in the upper two rows of folder icons.
Alan Dye, the VP of Human Interface Design, the Apple guy who spearheaded this UI change, is quoted as saying that Liquid Glass is “the foundation for new experiences in the future.” All well and good when you have a fuller view of the future as one assumes he would. But for those looking at their devices today, that means as much or as little as any tech promise or vision that have been dropped on us these last few years.
Liquid Design, in my very early looks is not to my taste. It may be to yours. the good news is that everything still appears to be functional. But to me, it’s a child-like appliqué on sophisticated devices that seem to beg for something more mature. I’m sure Liquid Glass will evolve, but until it does, I don’t think these bubbles will be popping soon.
Other Changes
I haven’t explored many of the new features of any of these new operating systems, only attempting to get things up and running. Most things appear to be running well.
A few changes I like include:
I prefer this iteration of the Photos app in iOS
I like the big multi-tasking changes for iPad and look forward to working with them more, although count me as one who will miss Slide Over. It was handy in my work in rehearsals.
I like the new Trash Can icon on the Mac. That’s the kind of whimsy I can support.
I love the wrist flick gesture on the Apple Watch.
Things I’m not a fan of:
On the Mac I miss the Shortcuts item in the menu bar. Yes, you can add one, but instead of getting a straight drop down of clickable Shortcuts, it now opens a new window that requires not only the selection of the Shortcut you want to execute, but another separate action to run the Shortcut. Adding clicks isn’t much of a shortcut to me. I see where Apple is going with this, trying to move things out of the Menu Bar into the Control Center. That’s going to require developers to make that move successful.
I’m not a fan of some of Apple’s redesigned icons.
I tried out the Tinting feature for icons. I could see myself using this, if the feature didn’t tint widgets. What’s the point of a tinted Photos widget?
Some things I’m on the fence about:
I’ve previously used independent apps Bartender and Ice to control the large number of Menu Bar icons I like to have available. Both are currently in beta so I’m testing out Apple’s feature to hide the Menu Bar until things change on those fronts. Simply put, that means the Menu Bar disappears until I hover over or click on it, revealing the icons. In using this feature when windows are at the top of the screen, Menu Commands sometimes disappear requiring some window rearrangement. This doesn’t happen consistently, so I’m guessing it’s a bug. I’m not sold on this in the early going but I’m giving it a try.
I’ve been using Raycast as an application and Shortcut launcher, along with some of its other features. I’m giving Apple’s new Spotlight features a try including the long overdue Clipboard Manager. This will require some muscle memory retraining, and it might mean leaving Raycast behind. It would be easier to do so if that Clipboard Manager copied across devices.
It’s early going. For me, as well as these new operating systems. I’ll discover more as I go along. I’m hoping the evolutionary pace for this software from Apple and most certainly developers will come close to matching mine in the days to come. I’m guessing it’s going to be sometime in 2026 before we can really evaluate what’s what in these OS 25 releases.
You can also find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.
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Life on the Wicked Stage: Act 3
Musings on life, the theatre, technology, culture and the occasional emu sighting
