Walking on Broken Glass

I love when I see the ★ in Feedbin from a John Gruber Daring Fireball post.

And Gruber doesn't pull any punches in describing Alan Dye's impact on Apple in his writeup of the news that Meta has hired Dye away from Apple, much to the apparent delight of a lot of Apple's employees:

The debate regarding Apple’s software design over the last decade isn’t between those on Dye’s side and those against. It’s only a matter of debating how bad it’s been, and how far it’s fallen from its previous remarkable heights. It’s rather extraordinary in today’s hyper-partisan world that there’s nearly universal agreement amongst actual practitioners of user-interface design that Alan Dye is a fraud who led the company deeply astray. It was a big problem inside the company too.

I happened to see a number of friends post about Dye leaving Apple who normally wouldn't comment on Apple employee changes.

And there’s excitement over Stephen Lemay, a long-time Apple designer, replacing Dye as head of Apple’s Human Interface design team:

At the very least, Lemay running HI should stop the bleeding — both in terms of work quality and talent retention. I sincerely believe things might measurably improve, but I’m more sure that things will stop getting worse. That alone will be a win for everyone — even though the change was seemingly driven by Mark Zuckerberg’s desire to poach Dye, not Tim Cook and Apple’s senior leadership realizing they should have shitcanned him long ago.

I know very little about anything internal at Apple, but I read Gruber's post as being of optimism for the future of software design at Apple, particularly on macOS.

As is often the case, John's footnotes are as good or better than most tech bloggers full posts, like #5:

It’s worth recalling that Zuckerberg sorta kinda tried this poach-design-talent-from-Apple thing before. Mike Matas, the wunderkind designer who became a sensation with Delicious Library in 2005, soon thereafter moved on to work at Apple, where he designed such things as the “slide to unlock” interface on the original iPhone.

It's fun to reflect on the era when the original iPhone was released. It felt like software developers and designers were household names—among us nerds at least—and new ways of thinking about mobile phones and the apps that run on them were changing everything.

As much as the current generation of AI software development feels similar, it all feels a lot more vapid and lacking somehow. Perhaps because there's very little hardware and real world physicality to AI. It's just a voice chat window or text box to type in.

It's not "slide to unlock" level of cool.