iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jonas Downey @jonas.do · 10/09/2026

One upcoming feature in iOS 27 is a new "extra large" widget size, which might as well be an entire app at this point, because it's nearly the same dimensions as a full screen app. But who are we to question this? So, behold, the upcoming Super Mega widget for Hello Weather:

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Jonas Downey @jonas.do · 30/08/2026

Whenever something deeply stupid like this happens in software, I always wonder what went down internally. Was there a conversation in Slack about it? Was it demanded by executives? Who made the change? Did they protest? I hope the commit message was funny at least: "Rename lake (revert in 2028)"

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Jonas Downey @jonas.do · 29/08/2026

Currently considering a second career as a Pancake Plant Farmer

A pancake plant (Pilea peperomioides) with several of its baby plants in smaller separate pots

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Jonas Downey @jonas.do · 27/08/2026

There's a new Twitter starting up, and it's worth the price of admission just for the nostalgia

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Jonas Downey @jonas.do · 17/07/2026

I haven't talked much about this, but one of the gut-wrenching things about designing a weather app is thinking through various extremes and disasters. We designed these UI elements hoping that most people would never see them.

Chicago forecast with hazardous air quality and poor visibility

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Jonas Downey @jonas.do · 03/06/2026

One of my favorite Internet pastimes is clicking NO on passive aggressive promotional upsells, to intentionally mess up the metrics for whatever dumb psychological conversion tricks the product team is trying to pull

Two buttons for a promotion on a wesbite:

"Yes I'm interested"
"No, I hate free stuff"

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Jonas Downey @jonas.do · 24/04/2026

sure, here you go! I don’t spend much time on the aesthetics of this, just try to keep it simple and low on distractions (except for Slack lol.)

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Jonas Downey @jonas.do · 20/02/2026

Modern software needs more stuff like this. Adding a small, superfluous human touch in a few places goes such a long way. (The original Mac OS had this sort of personal character scattered all over the place, but it's been gradually squeezed out over the years.)

high fiving pals at the bottom of a very long GitHub pull request diff

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Jonas Downey @jonas.do · 01/02/2026

Small personal news: a few weeks ago I started a new job at Superhuman, as the head of design for Superhuman Mail. Had a truly wonderful time at Figma, but have been feeling the itch to try something new. Excited to work on communication tools again (it's my happy place)

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Jonas Downey @jonas.do · 10/01/2026

We ended up running with the button-tab pattern for @helloweather.com, but used a location pin icon (to indicate "Location search") instead of a search icon. Still not convinced that was the best call, but we kinda tried to split the difference.

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Jonas Downey @jonas.do · 08/01/2026

we’re here now (and we’ve been here for a while)

“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” “And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed–if all records told the same tale–then the lie passed into history and became truth.” -1984

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Jonas Downey @jonas.do · 01/01/2026

happy canoe peer, friends

A photo of a canoe docked at a peer, also a terrible pun of “happy new year”

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Jonas Downey @jonas.do · 10/11/2025

Hello Weather is the app of the day all over the world today! Amazing to see this rolling out globally 🥹 apps.apple.com/us/story/id1...

App of the day promo art for Hello Weather

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Jonas Downey @jonas.do · 28/10/2025

just started thinking about the film Metropolis for totally no reason at all

A screenshot from Metropolis: “The year is 2026, a Dickensian
‘best of times, worst of times,’ where total oppression and manipulation of the masses is wielded by the unquestionable power of the few.

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Jonas Downey @jonas.do · 21/10/2025

This new option (in iOS 26.1 beta 4) is dramatically better for everything and should be the default.

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Jonas Downey @jonas.do · 28/07/2025

First summer garden sunflower 🌻

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Jonas Downey @jonas.do · 20/06/2025

we put a small homage to Mac OS 8 into the new Hello Weather, and I really hope Apple is cool with it, because I love it so much

The “Follow Us” screen in Hello Weather that links to our social media accounts, but in the visual style of a Mac OS 8 desktop

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Jonas Downey @jonas.do · 12/06/2025

trying out a new approach for visualizing all the little stuff I do as a manager

a screenshot from FigJam: "wtf jonas did this week"

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Jonas Downey @jonas.do · 10/06/2025

These ultra-translucent interfaces rarely work well as a system, because the transparency introduces way more problems than it solves. It’s form over function. I’d bet that a lot of this liquid glass stuff will end up more like semi-opaque-frosted-glass in the end. But it looks cool as a demo!

difficult to read text on glass in the Music app

Glassy Safari controls overlaid on a photographic website, also somewhat illegible

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Jonas Downey @jonas.do · 17/05/2025

ohh I love this! Not to mention some particularly great people who created it

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Jonas Downey @jonas.do · 10/05/2025

one of the many things I love about Chicago is that it's the funniest city

headline: Portillos honors new pope with 'The Leo' Italian Beef sandwich

paper of record with the headline "Da Pope"

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Jonas Downey @jonas.do · 12/04/2025

Fare thee well, lil cakes

a 3D rendering of my FigPal—a stack of pancakes wearing a top hat named "lil cakes"

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Jonas Downey @jonas.do · 12/04/2025

regular people: you should have onboarding in your app my nonsense brain:

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Jonas Downey @jonas.do · 03/04/2025

well, I guess we’re in phase 2 of a definitely smart economic plan

the underpants gnomes plan from South Park

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Jonas Downey @jonas.do · 25/03/2025

sometimes I wonder what digital interfaces would look like if they degraded from usage, like physical interfaces do. for example: imagine how many millions of times the Home button in this app is tapped every single day. It would look like this:

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Jonas Downey @jonas.do · 22/03/2025

Nabbed a couple of excellent finds at the record store today

Cassette tapes of R.E.M.’s Automatic for the People and Monster

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Jonas Downey @jonas.do · 01/03/2025

absolutely draconian password requirements

• Password should not be one of the last 10 passwords.
• Password should have 15 characters or more.
• At least one character from 3 of the 4 groups: upper case letters, lower case letters, numbers, special characters listed below.
1@#$%^&*()_+3f":;'21/>.,
• No more than 7 numbers
• No more than 2 consecutive identical characters may be used.

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Jonas Downey @jonas.do · 20/02/2025

It’s been “weather app QA testing season” in Chicago lately

A screenshot of the new Hello Weather, showing temperatures ranging from 1° to 44° over the course of a week

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Jonas Downey @jonas.do · 28/01/2025

I hope you explained it to them via fax

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Jonas Downey @jonas.do · 26/01/2025

We’re close to releasing a big @helloweather.com beta update, and I’m especially proud of the extra care we gave to all the supporting screens that are usually dull in apps (like app news, or terms of service.) We tried to make them into their own special little universes:

the News & Updates screen in the new Hello Weather for iOS

the Terms of Service screen in the new Hello Weather for iOS

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Jonas Downey @jonas.do · 16/01/2025

LinkedIn is out here reminding me of the short, fleeting, existential preciousness of life, and how we devote so much of our tragically limited time on Earth to our professions— —as an upsell to Premium

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Jonas Downey @jonas.do · 04/01/2025

I think this blurb from 404 media sums it up. If you equate user satisfaction with engagement, then you just chase after anything with a positive metric

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Jonas Downey @jonas.do · 01/01/2025

happy gnu ear, friends

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Jonas Downey @jonas.do · 30/12/2024

what's the best VS Code extension, and why is it VS Code Pets

a brown pixel cat and white dog playing in VS Code

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Jonas Downey @jonas.do · 28/12/2024

randomly remembered our best release notes from a few years ago

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Jonas Downey @jonas.do · 27/12/2024

I’m at the stage of vacation where I’m debating whether we need… 1. an antique Mac to play old games, or 2. a new Mac to emulate playing old games

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Jonas Downey @jonas.do · 24/12/2024

the best thing about the holidays

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Jonas Downey @jonas.do · 22/12/2024

We’re in the final stages of polish before shipping the new @helloweather.com app, so I’ve started reflecting on the nearly three year process of rebuilding it completely from scratch. This is the first thing that poured out

Screenshot of some writing:

There is not a single damn detail in this app that I have not personally agonized about. If something is bad, I already know about it, and I probably feel bad about it.

The problem with having high standards for yourself is that every time you reach them, you raise them. This can be self defeating. You have to decide to be done at some point.

So, if something isn’t good yet, it’s because we didn't have enough time in our lives to make it better, or it wasn’t even possible to make it better. That's the level of care we tried to give to this. It’s the best thing we know how to make.

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Jonas Downey @jonas.do · 19/12/2024

Randomly reminiscing about old weird computers I used and loved … which ones are on your list?

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Jonas Downey @jonas.do · 12/12/2024

Slack keeps adding new features to deal with overwhelming amounts of information, but this just punts responsibility onto users—more places to look, and more things to manage manually. The overwhelm gets gradually worse every time. We're really due for a total reimagining of chat firehose apps

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Jonas Downey @jonas.do · 28/11/2024

how it started 🤩 / how it's going 🥺

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