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Duncan McAlester

@mcalester.design
45 followers 216 following 204 posts

Design Technologist • Dot Connector • Culture Builder Former Lead Astro UX Design System

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Duncan McAlester @mcalester.design · 14h
I’m not a scientist and I know anecdotal weather claims are dumb, but the ocean here usually hits low-to-mid 70s around late August and we get 4-6 weeks above 70. This summer it hit 7OF in early June and hasn’t gone below 72F since, frequently above 76F. It’s been lovely, but also scary.
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Duncan McAlester @mcalester.design · 30/09/2026
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 · 20/09/2026
I remember desperately wanting this a few years ago. After reading WebKit’s objections I generally agreed with their concerns. I admit I don’t recall the arguments now, does your polyfill address any of those concerns or do you think they’re no longer (or never were) valid?
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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
TBF there are lots of UX issues, but those exist across the nascent AR/VR/XR category. Apple’s acquisition of a company that does sub-vocal speech to text will go a long way to solving many of those problems (if that’s what/why they acquired them)
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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 · 31/08/2026
This times a million. I am guilty of wrapping components in JavaScript that added zero functional benefit under the false idols of “consistency” and style encapsulation. No more. JavaScript doesn’t get added anymore unless the platform doesn’t support a defined user need.
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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 · 19/08/2026
I have nothing of value to add other than I love seeing my fellow type nerds nerding out.
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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 · 01/07/2026
Once again …
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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 · 22/06/2026
Done :)
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Duncan McAlester @mcalester.design · 22/06/2026
::before/::after on input elements.
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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 · 15/06/2026
This was Telemundo via Peacock
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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
Any updates on the Temporal API? The WebKit team was way out front on this, but never exposed the parts that exist and development seems to have stopped.
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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
But that’s not the point of Apple Intelligence. On device has a 4K context window; PCC has a 32K context window. This is “personal assistant” territory not an agentic platform to develop apps. It’s why — I presume Xcode doesn’t use AFM for its agentic coding.
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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 · 08/06/2026
Velocity as a term has been corrupted, particularly by various agile methodologies and tools. It’s become synonymous with speed, but velocity is speed *and* direction and actually encapsulates the thesis of your article. We should reclaim the word.
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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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Duncan McAlester @mcalester.design · 01/06/2026
One of the best. And on more than one occasion a little depressing.
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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
As an example my partner is a tremendously talented painter and she wanted a new site, her options were something like SquareSpace or Claude. The latter gave her far more creative control to establish what she wanted without having to learn why one element should use flex vs grid for layout
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Duncan McAlester @mcalester.design · 27/05/2026
Today’s web is so complex, creativity requires far more technical knowledge to be on equal footing and IMO that stifles a lot of people who could be creating.
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Duncan McAlester @mcalester.design · 27/05/2026
CSS sort of illustrates my point. In the old days a web site was a handful of HTML pages and maybe some linked images. We were all on equal technical footing; the kid in his bedroom and Razorfish had the same tools. The distinguishing attribute was creativity …
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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 · 27/05/2026
It’s another reason I’m excited by AI. The web used to be a place where anyone with Notepad and an ability to FTP could create a website. Today it is both easier and orders of magnitude harder. TBF it is trading one corp for another right now, but liberation is on the horizon with local LLMs.
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Duncan McAlester @mcalester.design · 25/05/2026
“Competence Porn” (not a super fan of that term, but here we are) is tremendously satisfying these days. It’s also refreshing that Grace is a nice person, the “smartest person in the room” genre is also frequently the biggest jerk in the room too.
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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 · 21/05/2026
“Never hallucinate” is definitely dumb & there is no simple "trick", but using Best of N analysis, a multi-agent system that cross-check & validate, requiring cited sources for output, keeping your context window < 50% utilization does reduce hallucinations a lot. Still need a human in the loop.
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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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