iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Duncan McAlester @mcalester.design · 23h

Funny, the Simpson’s House parody was able to license the Massive Attack theme song, but the digital release of House has to use a replacement track.

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Duncan McAlester @mcalester.design · 24/09/2026

It might just old dog, new tricks, but I’m using Microsoft’s suite on macOS for the first time and I cannot internalize their icons. Every single time it takes me a split second to figure out which app I want.

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Duncan McAlester @mcalester.design · 21/09/2026

I do quite enjoy that both “manage the pennies and the pounds will manage themselves” and “penny wise and pound foolish”, the same behavior yet diametrically opposed outcomes.

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Duncan McAlester @mcalester.design · 18/09/2026

The Siri AI user interface is better on macOS than on iOS

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Duncan McAlester @mcalester.design · 11/09/2026

Real talk. If your Operating System font isn’t as comprehensive as SF Pro you should just ship Inter. It’s embarrassing how lacking the glyphs are in Segoe, Cantarell, Ubuntu and Roboto.

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Duncan McAlester @mcalester.design · 06/09/2026

It’s such a bummer that system-ui fonts across platforms don’t universally support slashed-zero and disambiguating glyphs. I *think* only Apple’s San Francisco does — though it uses more obscure CSS to implement.

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Duncan McAlester @mcalester.design · 05/09/2026

Hot take. VisionOS is by far Apple’s most polished UI. The underlying fundamentals (spacing, typography, contrast) are objectively better while the not-quite “liquid glass” effects are more subtle, sophisticated and less “gee whiz”.

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Duncan McAlester @mcalester.design · 28/08/2026

My octogenarian dad just got hired as a consultant. He retired 17 years ago and he was never very good with technology. Imagine jumping back in to work after the SaaS takeover. Slack, Google Docs, MFA apps … I don’t have to as I’m now adhoc IT over messages.

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Duncan McAlester @mcalester.design · 27/08/2026

I have never been so happy to see a thick marine layer roll in. I thought I would end the day today looking like someone had just opened the Ark of the Covenant in front of me.

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Duncan McAlester @mcalester.design · 21/08/2026

Anyone else notice IKEA has started to sell more products that are solid wood? MDF/particle board based products are still dominant, but I was surprised picking up a new bed for a growing kiddo to see it was solid birch as were a noticeable amount of other products.

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Duncan McAlester @mcalester.design · 08/08/2026

IT’S HAPPENING!! Safari Technology Preview has finally enabled Temporal API support!! I am unreasobaly excited by this API developer.apple.com/documentatio...

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Duncan McAlester @mcalester.design · 03/08/2026

The handcuffs you accepted when opting in to frameworks, libraries and products like Webflow, Canva, et al., have never felt more restrictive.

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Duncan McAlester @mcalester.design · 31/07/2026

Can anyone explain to me why you would wrap a list element <ul> in React wrapper. The only thing I can come up with is simpler, but constrained DX.

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Duncan McAlester @mcalester.design · 28/07/2026

I’ve long considered Apple’s Shortcuts to be a secret weapon in AI workflows, the upgrades in iOS 27 are solidifying that idea. Beginning to wonder if Shortcuts might not be the HyperCard of the AI era (hopefully with a better end of course)

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Duncan McAlester @mcalester.design · 18/07/2026

I have a pitch for the BBC charter for the future of Doctor Who. It’s simple, two words: Mike Wozniak.

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Duncan McAlester @mcalester.design · 14/07/2026

Echoing others, but Siri AI is legitimately good. It’s not game changing, but it’s a very solid foundation and as app intents and the upgraded Shortcuts start to take hold I think it could give things like Clawdbot a run for its money as a personal assistant.

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Duncan McAlester @mcalester.design · 11/07/2026

Just noticed AirPods with adaptive noise cancelling will lower the volume of the music if they detect an emergency siren. So the siren isn’t ear splitting, but it still takes priority over all other audio. Clever.

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Duncan McAlester @mcalester.design · 09/07/2026

I have a context window and definitely start getting dumber the closer to full it gets, but I definitely can’t start a new session as fast.

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Duncan McAlester @mcalester.design · 27/06/2026

If every England player played with the intensity and commitment of Harry Kane, even without his generational skill, England would be unstoppable.

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Duncan McAlester @mcalester.design · 17/06/2026

Fully convinced Harry Kane could finish a match with the best goal, the best pass/assist and the best save. He’s a monster.

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Duncan McAlester @mcalester.design · 14/06/2026

The scoreboard graphics are so bad. Unnecessary white outlines around the flags and jersey colors. Worse are the random colors borders. Orange & red for the Netherlands and lime & mauve for Japan. Why? Cyan background for the scores, again why? The 26 and tiny trophy add even more noise.

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Duncan McAlester @mcalester.design · 14/06/2026

Despite not understanding Spanish, World Cup coverage on Peacock en Español is so much better than Fox’s coverage for a host of reasons, not the least of which being 100% less Alexi Lalas.

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Duncan McAlester @mcalester.design · 14/06/2026

Apple Wallet has been in desperate need of more nuanced organization and custom passes is going to exacerbate the issue quite a bit. Would be great to have geolocation preferences that associate card or cards with a specific location.

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Duncan McAlester @mcalester.design · 12/06/2026

Space the final frontier … [the] continuing mission — much to my surprise and genuine delight. See you out there!

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Duncan McAlester @mcalester.design · 10/06/2026

Lots of cool stuff in WebKit, but still no Temporal API. I’m so curious what happened there, WebKit was the first to implement parts of the API, but it’s never been available even behind developer flags and no mention in release notes for a while now. webkit.org/blog/17967/n...

webkit.org

News from WWDC26: WebKit in Safari 27 beta

Safari 27 beta is here.

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Duncan McAlester @mcalester.design · 09/06/2026

It’s funny to see the stratification of response to Apple’s AI announcements yesterday. There’s clearly a large contingent of folks who think AI = Frontier Model and yesterday was a letdown. Then there’s the folks who see 20B param model on device w/unique architecture and think “wow”

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Duncan McAlester @mcalester.design · 03/06/2026

Forward Deployed [Some Normal Job Title] … I don’t like this trend, but then again, I’ve always found the job title adjective-expansion in knowledge work jobs to be eye rolling. My sink is backed up, I’m checking for a local Bilateral Fluid Systems Engineer.

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Reposted by Duncan McAlester

Kelly Norton @kellegous.com · 30/05/2026

When you create a new empty React app, how many people have the ability to run code on your computer? Let's say you get started with, bun create vite my-app --template=react-ts Unique deps: 180 Unique maintainers: 168 168 targets for a supply chain attack ... just to start.

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Duncan McAlester @mcalester.design · 27/05/2026

Cypher’s Law (the guy from the Matrix): I don’t care if your content was created by AI, I just don’t want know it was created by AI.

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Duncan McAlester @mcalester.design · 25/05/2026

Fantasy dream jobs change a lot through one’s life. Astronaut, football star, video game developer … I’ve entered the phase of life where I want to be part of the panel show cohort, hopping from one thin premise of a show to another and just having a lark with my mates.

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Duncan McAlester @mcalester.design · 20/05/2026

Minimum font size expressed as points or pixels is classic cargo cult behavior. Most of font size studies cited were conducted on 72dpi monitors with poorly translated print typefaces. Users should determine their min font size. Your job is to ensure the app doesn’t break.

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Duncan McAlester @mcalester.design · 12/05/2026

Given yet another NPM supply chain attack thought I’d throw out something small I’ve been toying with. Zero dependency, thin layer over Temporal’s PlainDateTime object. dmcalester.github.io/nova/

dmcalester.github.io

Nova — Temporal

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Duncan McAlester @mcalester.design · 11/05/2026

Fungibility and ergonomics are two of the more important concepts in AI. There’s an initial tension between the two, but if you can resolve it, they amplify each other rather than conflict.

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Duncan McAlester @mcalester.design · 07/05/2026

Just dawned on me ADHD is your brain running a multi-agent harness at all times. Even has the same bottleneck.

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Duncan McAlester @mcalester.design · 06/05/2026

The crazy thing about this is 1994 was the first major chip architecture migration (68K to PowePC) at the time it felt like 68K Mac’s had been around forever. In hindsight the 68K era will likely be the shortest CPU era (PPC: 12 years; Intel: 16 years; M: 6 years and counting)

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Duncan McAlester @mcalester.design · 05/05/2026

One of my biggest Design System hindsight regrets is not prioritizing a plan to create guidance and rules for CLI tools.

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Duncan McAlester @mcalester.design · 28/04/2026

Testing out something new. My best agents are ones that grow iteratively, but they can drift from their original purpose. This skill is an attempt to guard against that in the spirit of Gall’s Law github.com/dmcalester/a...

github.com

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Duncan McAlester @mcalester.design · 24/04/2026

It’s still kind of revelatory that Apple’s M-series is the first laptop I’ve owned (and I’ve owned a bunch), that is truly a portable computer. Unless I’m traveling I never bring my power brick and I’ve run out of energy before it does.

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Duncan McAlester @mcalester.design · 22/04/2026

There’s a weird friction in 2026. What I can do on my computer is orders of magnitude more than when I got started back with Apple BASIC, decades and a few interface paradigms later I spend more time in the command line than ever before.

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Duncan McAlester @mcalester.design · 15/04/2026

Don’t forget to fork and clone your favorite open source repos. You never know when they’ll vanish.

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Duncan McAlester @mcalester.design · 13/04/2026

I’ve been re-reading a bunch of singularity books lately and realized multiple sub-agents isn’t the key, it’s multiple versions of me running in git forks … wait no git worktrees. A lot of these books would have avoided problems if their primes used worktrees instead of forks.

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Duncan McAlester @mcalester.design · 09/04/2026

I bet @gruber.foo had no clue back when he was hacking together markdown that it would become a critical enabling format for AI/LLMs. It’s maybe a tad hyperbolic, but in time might be viewed on par with Tim Berners-Lee’s HTML.

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Duncan McAlester @mcalester.design · 07/04/2026

I got to work “in space” for a decade, it was without question the most meaningful work of my career. Images like this are why.

Earth rise over the moon taken from the Artemis mission

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Duncan McAlester @mcalester.design · 01/04/2026

It’s not April Fool’s Day, it’s just another day in an April Fool’s epoch where actual headline news makes a mockery of the fanciful nonsense usually reserved for one tedious day of the year.

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Duncan McAlester @mcalester.design · 25/03/2026

The rise of these multi-pane personal dashboard/productivity/terminal apps support AI feels very …

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Duncan McAlester @mcalester.design · 24/03/2026

@panic.com the hit area of your download icon for Prompt is tied to the image area, not its bounding box. help.panic.com/prompt/promp...

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Duncan McAlester @mcalester.design · 18/03/2026

"Command contains quoted characters in flag names" About to rage quit Claude Code for Codex/OpenCode/pi. Bad at opportunity cost math, so far the set-up time cost has been too much, but this bug is death by paper cut.

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Duncan McAlester @mcalester.design · 16/03/2026

Recall vs recognition was a core concept in the development of graphical user interfaces. It’s interesting as I create more and more SKILLS.md files, history is repeating. I can’t keep track of them all. I suspect it’s a temporary constraint, and the solution is not a GUI, though

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