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Posts by Jonas Downey

Thanks for the kind words!

1 day ago 0 0 0 0

these are bit old now, but should get you started:

bsky.app/profile/jona...

5 days ago 0 0 1 0
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Why You Hate Your Weather App As the weather becomes less predictable, we need forecasts and apps that are better at telling us what we don’t know.

oh hey, I'm in the New Yorker chatting about weather apps

www.newyorker.com/culture/infi...

(I hope you don't hate @helloweather.com though)

1 week ago 18 1 1 0
more green river

more green river

sheesh

3 weeks ago 4 0 0 0
dyeing the Chicago river for St. Patrick’s

dyeing the Chicago river for St. Patrick’s

Green day

3 weeks ago 9 0 1 0
“This Is Not The Computer For You” · Sam Henri Gold Sam Henri Gold is a product design engineer building playful, useful software.

The MacBook Neo is such an interesting machine that it coaxed a thousand-word-essay out of me: samhenri.gold/blog/2026031...

4 weeks ago 226 91 18 25

haha Mike! Are you ride or die for light mode?

4 weeks ago 0 0 1 0

Question for designy friends: which app or product has the most beautiful dark mode interface?

4 weeks ago 8 1 5 0
high fiving pals at the bottom of a very long GitHub pull request diff

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

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.)

1 month ago 16 0 1 0
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Same goes to you man! Proud of all of us for getting through the other side of that stuff.

1 month ago 1 0 0 0

Agreed. It really does not 🙃

1 month ago 1 0 1 0
Backseat Software – Mike Swanson's Blog

I love this post about "backseat software." When software evolved into an economic engine of its own, user-centric product design got clobbered by aggressive business growth tactics.

This is why so many products now feel more hostile than helpful:

blog.mikeswanson.com/backseat-sof...

2 months ago 6 1 0 0

whoa! now we just need an entire phone in this style

2 months ago 1 0 1 0

BEFORE AI: "Would it be faster to do this manual task, or to write a script to do the task for me?"

AFTER AI: "Would it be faster to do this manual task, or to ask an approximation machine to solve it accurately, then proofread its inevitable messes?"

2 months ago 6 1 0 0
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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)

2 months ago 56 0 7 0

Seriously asking: what the heck happened to iOS autocorrect? I remember some point in the past when it worked properly, and now … not

2 months ago 8 0 2 0
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a woman in a black sequined jumpsuit is walking through a foggy forest . ALT: a woman in a black sequined jumpsuit is walking through a foggy forest .

Catherine O’Hara is one of those few people who could turn a creative role into a higher art. Not just a comedian or actor, but someone who elevated and changed the entire idea of those things.

Absolutely inspiring legend 💔

2 months ago 6 0 1 0

$14-ish annually

2 months ago 1 0 1 0

Just tried @aeronautapp.com, a Mac app for Bluesky. It feels like being transported back to the glory days of Twitter 3rd party apps (like 2014 or so? It reminds me of Tweetie or Echofon.)

Anyway, this makes Bluesky nicer. Well worth the subscription!

2 months ago 21 0 2 0

The brutality of all of this is absolutely horrific and unconscionable, but what really gets me is the pointlessness. None of this needs to happen for any reason whatsoever. It’s just dumb stupid brutality for the sake of it

2 months ago 14 0 2 0
Bob Weir and Jerry Garcia together

Bob Weir and Jerry Garcia together

💔

2 months ago 2 0 0 0

This piece is spot on. And let’s also remember that literally anyone in Musk’s orbit or anyone working at X could move to fix it, but they’re just letting this disgusting trash fester anyway

2 months ago 4 0 0 0

Agreed, I think because it breaks longstanding muscle memory? Or creates disorientation because too much core UI shifts around when the tab is focused, so you lose your sense of place for a few moments.

Can't exactly put my finger on it, but it still throws me off and I haven't gotten used to it

2 months ago 0 0 0 0

I think there's an underlying tale like:

software made for humans
vs.
software made for corporations (to sell to humans)

and the difference is often in the soul and charm and whimsy of the product

2 months ago 12 3 0 0
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iOS 26 tabs in Hello Weather

iOS 26 tabs in Hello Weather

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.

2 months ago 7 0 3 0
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My Beef with the iOS 26 Tab Bar The iOS 26 search tab looks more like an action button than a tab. That's causing problems for developers like me who want to follow Apple's guidelines.

I fussed around with this oddball Search tab/button pattern SO MUCH before iOS 26 came out.

The new iOS design language has many different ways to accomplish similar things, and affordances are less differentiated, so it's really hard to know what's "right."

ryanashcraft.com/ios-26-tab-b...

2 months ago 9 0 1 0

love this! Such a fun detail

3 months ago 2 0 0 0
“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

“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

we’re here now

(and we’ve been here for a while)

3 months ago 4 0 0 0

With the deepfake trash happening on X, a constant stream of falsehoods and rewritten history spilling from the US govt, and AI generated content becoming more prevalent rapidly, this first week of 2026 feels very post-trust.

3 months ago 6 0 1 0

For a while I’ve felt that we’re entering the Post-Trust era of information, where skepticism becomes our default mode of consumption, since almost nothing can be believed as real at a glance.

3 months ago 5 0 1 0