Author | Lightnews

Duncan McAlester @dmcalester.bsky.social · 19h

Concur. Being from SoCal I’m spoiled for choice when it comes to good tacos. El Gordo was a pleasant surprise particularly being on The Strip.

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Duncan McAlester @dmcalester.bsky.social · 1d

Wait really? Now I need to go ask the Thing.

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Duncan McAlester @dmcalester.bsky.social · 2d

Apple is so close to a “Pareto” product development suite: Notes (withMarkdown import/export), Reminders (in Kanban view), Freeform, Pixelmator, and tie it all together with Shortcuts.

Native, local, private, lean, and most importantly not reliant on feature bloat for MRR.

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Duncan McAlester @dmcalester.bsky.social · 4d

A failing of design systems has been how we have more often than not clung to the illusion of control. They rarely invite derivation and routinely explicitly forbid it. Systems that are incapable of evolving and adapting are doomed to fail, either through disuse or disdain.

Duncan McAlester @dmcalester.bsky.social · 5d

I’d like to be proven wrong, but there are so many variables. The overall font rendering engine, the specific user-selected font rendering settings, the screen size, the screen resolution … the actual font itself. A requirement of 0.12:1 ratio is a blunt instrument.

Duncan McAlester @dmcalester.bsky.social · 5d

One of the studies used as justification only tested MS Word (historically bad font rendering) & concludes: Although MS Word is almost universally used in mainstream schools to modify teaching resources, for low-vision readers, the method of applying letter spacing and its effect are not clear.

Duncan McAlester @dmcalester.bsky.social · 5d

I’d be interested in the rationale behind WCAG 1.4.12, specifically “Letter spacing (tracking) to at least 0.12 times the font size”. Why is there a blanket formula being applied to thousands of fonts many of which have had their geometry expertly crafted by typographers?

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Duncan McAlester @dmcalester.bsky.social · 5d

Three blocks north and a mile south and I get these speeds. I get a very reasonable 150 Mbps down and less reasonable 3 Mbps up, but I’d ditch my cable connection in a heartbeat for these speeds.

Duncan McAlester @dmcalester.bsky.social · 7d

I know you’re not supposed to fall in love with the first concept sketch … I’m just saying the next ones are going to need to be pretty special.

Duncan McAlester @dmcalester.bsky.social · 8d

Reminds me a bit of one of the arguments against LLM-generated code: “you don’t know what it wrote” to which I have always thought, “but yeah, you have a gigabyte of Node.js module dependencies”

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Duncan McAlester @dmcalester.bsky.social · 12d

Whoa! That’s a big jump for WebKit. Well done to all. Interop is my favorite standards effort.

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Duncan McAlester @dmcalester.bsky.social · 14d

Completely agree. At my last talk, I started my slide deck with UI “scribbled” out and then showed paired terms that also didn’t make sense. That type of audience (non-designers) would always ask, “Was it UX/UI or UI/UX?” My explanations never really landed; using terms they were familiar with did.

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Duncan McAlester @dmcalester.bsky.social · 21d

Hey marquee still works in Chrome, Firefox and Safari. Some wanted a ticker style component and I joked we should just use <marquee>. Lo and behold it works just fine.

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Duncan McAlester @dmcalester.bsky.social · 22d

Looking at my music library & feeling the urge to nuke it & start from zero. 40 years of Colombia House, record shop jobs, Napster et. al., iTunes, Apple Music … has left me with tens of thousands of songs. 95% are unplayed in the last 15 years & easily found on Spotify/Apple Music if I so desired

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Duncan McAlester @dmcalester.bsky.social · 25d

What’s the German word for that feeling you get when you’ve hit your annual deductible? Some combo of recognizing you’re getting old, annoyance that you’ve spent thousands on top of your exorbitant monthly premiums, and industry seeing what you should get for “free” in the last quarter of 2025.

Duncan McAlester @dmcalester.bsky.social · Sep 29

Remember when magnets and computers and displays were an awful combo? Now you have a whole industry of accessories based around sticking things to your phone with magnets.

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Duncan McAlester @dmcalester.bsky.social · Sep 27

I really wish Apple Music had an Infinite Playlist option but for albums and while we’re at it a "mega next" so if you’re not feeling the next album.

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Duncan McAlester @dmcalester.bsky.social · Sep 22

Definitely agree. Text selection has been noticeably improved. I also get fewer.periods.instead.of.spaces mistakes. If you ignored the Liquid Glass aspect, the rest has a real powerful ”Snow Leopard” vibe to it.

Duncan McAlester @dmcalester.bsky.social · Sep 22

The updated Shortcuts app in macOS and iOS is pretty intriguing. If structured output is a powerful constraint to help guide LLM outputs, Apple could have a real secret weapon.

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Duncan McAlester @dmcalester.bsky.social · Sep 18

I’m reminded of Hemingway’s response when asked “how did you go broke?” He responded “two ways: gradually, then suddenly”.

We have entered the suddenly phase.

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Duncan McAlester @dmcalester.bsky.social · Aug 17

Just booked a capsule hotel in Tokyo. It’s been in my bucket list since reading Neuromancer some 35 years ago.

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Duncan McAlester @dmcalester.bsky.social · Aug 2

Part of the appeal of Claude Code is it brings back that immediacy and experimentation of the early web when all you needed was NotePad and a browser. The web is inarguably more useful and usable today, but it’s also so much more boring.

Duncan McAlester @dmcalester.bsky.social · Jul 31

10 years ago, very few shipped a design system with Web Components.

5 years ago, very few shipped design systems with Design Tokens.

5 years from now, very few will ship design systems with component libraries.

10 years from now, design systems will be procedurally derived and abstracted.

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Duncan McAlester @dmcalester.bsky.social · Jul 25

A flaw humans have when it comes to comparing automation to human capability is seeing any error as indicative of failure.

It’s like the old axiom when being chased by a lion; I don’t need to be faster than the lion, just faster than you.

Automation is going to be less flawed than most of us.

Duncan McAlester @dmcalester.bsky.social · Jul 24

People always post these immaculate workstation setups and they are amazing and inspiring. Mine is very messy, but I looked down and saw this and it sums up so much. A pocket watercolor kit and sketchbook right next to a case of random Arduino and other circuit boards.

Picture of a pocket watercolor kit and circuit boards.

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