First of all, correction for part 1 – the “focus mode” wasn’t removed. It was renamed to “quiet mode” and relocated to a different part of the UI, and I failed to spot it there. It’s still slightly perplexing, shiftily capitalized, and I doubt fully effective, but the effort is there:

I also want to warn you there will be no more positive things I say in this post.

When Cabel Sasser posted this on Bluesky in February…

…I experienced a little existential dread.

Now that I’ve experienced the dialog myself in Photoshop 2026, and a few other dialogs that have been upgraded toward what Adobe calls “modern user interface,” how did it fare?

These are 2025 windows and their 2026 equivalents:

On the surface, it feels like a lateral move. I do not personally find the new design language (Spectrum) attractive, or even particularly “modern.” The gestalt remains off and things are still generally misaligned – they’re just misaligned in net new ways.

But it was digging into the window below that showed all the problems in the still-wet foundations…

…and a lot of them have to do with focus.

1.
The first field is not focused, so you cannot start typing the number after opening this window. You need to immediately move your hand to the mouse.

2.
If you click on any field, the value is not pre-selected, so you cannot start typing a new number then.

A combination of both is rough in practice in repeated use, violating some of the basic things like this classic principle of interaction design:

Principle: Defaults within fields should be easy to “blow away”

When a user activates a field, the current entry should be auto-selected so that pressing Backspace/​Delete or starting to type will eliminate the current entry. Users can click within the field to deselect the whole, dropping the text pointer exactly where the user has clicked. The select-on-entry rule is generally followed today. (Sloppy coding, however, has resulted in the text cursor dropping at various unpredictable locations. )

3.
Clicking on parts of the input field doesn’t bring it into focus even though the hover state promises it. (Discrepancies between hover and focus handling are a horrible new thing I’m starting to see more in recent interfaces.)

4.
Simply backspacing through the field shows a crude error modal and – to add a second injury to the first injury – the dialog removes focus from the field!

5.
Tabbing now goes through “Pixels” menu on the way from Width to Height, making it harder to type width → press Tab → type height → press Enter, in a nice quick keyboard gesture.

I will recognize this is a tricky one, because it exposes a core tension with tabbing: some people use it for comprehensive keyboard access, but others want an accelerator “express train” with only relevant stops. However, macOS already has a “Keyboard navigation” setting for that – you can choose whether tabbing should go through all the controls, or only those you get to type in. Not only does Photoshop ignore that preference, but it’s inconsistent with itself – you can see that you cannot get to Anchor via tabbing anyway!

6.
Clicking on the “relative” checkbox or canvas extension color does not restore focus to last control like it used to.

7–∞.
There are tons of other transgressions. Some are downwind from focus; for example, undoing after moving a slider no longer works, because the ⌘Z keystroke is now swallowed by a UI element that doesn’t know what to do with it. Some are unrelated: Pull-downs are now of the slower kind, pressing ⌥P results in more blinking, and this tooltip below feels so cheap that I’m surprised it’s not a talking point of the current U.S. administration:

I am tired even just noticing all this. (What is that weird clump of pixels on the left of the bottom edge!? Did no one spot it before launch?)

So now what?

I generally avoid such harsh labels on this blog, but: this is awful work.

I’m angry. (Clearly.) We should all be angry in the face of stuff like this. This is how people get fed up with software – because it feels unstable and deteriorates on its own without needing to.

I know I brought up that an existing power user base can be a huge pain in the ass, and I am a decades-old Photoshop power user. But this is different than other examples where the product needs or at least wants to evolve past its core audience or toward a different market. For Photoshop here, nothing I see indicates any change in course or clientele – and yet all of these good moments in UI that used to help me out no longer exist.

Plus, all those transgressions are solved problems. Those issues are not buried in pages of heavily litigated patents, or in seven collective brains of world-class interface designers whose driveways are presently occupied by cash-filled trucks sent over by frontier companies. This isn’t some long lost art that requires archaeologists to decipher. This feels like carelessness and laziness in face of basic UI engineering; in a likely internally-motivated effort to refresh the interface, the team threw an entire nursery worth of babies with the bathwater.

It’s not just about disservice to craft. It’s not even about disrespect for change management, trivialization of institutional memory, and disinvestment in quality assurance. This isn’t only, in Tog’s words above, “sloppy coding.” This is also a failure of imagination. It’s not that hard to picture people spending 8+ hours a day going through these windows for years if not decades to come, and it’s not hard to add and multiply all of these microfrustrations into numbers that should make one pause. With these many paper cuts, you need to start thinking about establishing a blood bank. How can you expect people to use a professional tool effectively if you throw in so many roadblocks?

In an internally-motivated UI refresh like this, you not only need to meet users where they used to be, you also ideally have to give them more to cover for the pains of change. Sometimes that “more” is better storytelling – here, no one even tried to really sell me on the new interface – but ideally “more” means actual felt improvements. I’m not on the team, but it’s not that hard to imagine some of them:

• Change those annoying modals that announce typing errors into something lighter and more modern, like attached tooltips.
• Add more comprehensive equation support so e.g. I could type “660*2” like I can in increasingly more and more apps.
• Announce the invisible shortcuts that already exist, or add a few ones.
• Add a bit of memory/​stickiness to some options (like Use Legacy in the first window), so I don’t have to keep toggling them over and over again.

I started this post talking about a setting, and there is another setting in Photoshop, buried on the last page – you can turn off this “modern user interface” that feels so underbaked the moment you start actually using it. But is that a real solution to anything? Toggle it on and the existential dread comes back: Am I going to miss out on some good stuff? When is the hammer going to drop? It’s not a tax break, it’s only a tax extension.

Even this view above shows so little care, it would ordinarily deserve its own post.

The search for the strangest Adobe setting continues in Lightroom, where the first option in the Interface section is… end marks:

Presently, only one option is there…

…but at least back in 2012 there were many more:

What does it do? It adds an old-time’y glyph at the end of either left or right panel.

The internet is rife with people perplexed by this option and I cannot deny – I’m one of them. (The title of this post is a reaction of one of the users.) It feels like such a peculiar way to add delight.

You are not limited to the pre-existing (one) flourish, as you can upload your own. Some people add a logo of their production studio, but John Beardsworth found a more creative use:

Alternatively, with a tiny bit of imagination you can exploit an often-forgotten detail of Lightroom’s interface – the “panel end marks”. These decorations at the bottom of Lightroom’s panels have often been derided as a waste of programming time, but in fact they can be made to serve more than their somewhat-trivial purpose. And as you can see in the examples on this page, they can serve as a reminder of star ratings, colour labels and even keyboard shortcuts for flags.

This is a fascinating hack, and an example of William Gibson’s famous “the street finds its own uses for things.” It made me curious why didn’t onscreen interfaces ever evolve to allow you to annotate them easily? You see stuff like this a lot in real life…

…but the Lightroom end mark hack is the only thing that comes to my mind where an onscreen UI got this kind of a treatment – and the feature wasn’t even intended for that use.

You can tell the story of Mac OS via the story of its settings, and the same is likely true of Photoshop.

Recently, spelunking in the preferences of Photoshop 2025, I found this extremely curious thing:

To transcribe:

Focus mode limits the appearance of certain optional user interface messages so that you can use Photoshop with fewer interruptions.

With this option enabled:

• The Welcome screen will not include “what’s new” feature descriptions
• Blue in-product alerts promoting discovery and use of certain features will be suppressed
• What’s New will not auto start when Photoshop is launched
• The color mode preference will be auto set to “Neutral Color Mode”

The three first options should be self explanatory. Neutral Color Mode is sort of the “graphite” option of Photoshop’s UI where the (already rare?) accented blue elements become white instead.

As much as I’ll always applaud a piece of software working on annoying you less, this is all so very strange. I don’t mean that the last option seems unrelated, and the first and third one kind of mutually exclusive… but just the very idea of shoving it in as an opt-in in the last tab of settings, under “technology previews”, and asking people for feedback feels peculiar to me.

Not to spoil the outcome, but even this “technology preview” is completely gone in the updated Photoshop 2026. I wonder if this is fallout from a mangled launch (even for those few who I imagined turned it on, the option didn’t live up to its promise), but also perhaps a political fight inside Adobe between product and growth teams? I bet we’ll never know.

I do not personally have a grand unified theory of how to explain things or announce features in products because it’s so situational, and I understand that especially Photoshop given its age might be the hardest difficulty level. I’d personally prefer to receive announcements of new features over email so I can read them at my leisure, and with each new thing or change linked to a playground that would allow me to experience it in the best way – but I can’t say with any certainty that this would work for everyone.

But I would expect people on the Photoshop team to have more experience here, and this focus mode approach just feels a bit… naïve to me. My two warm takes: 1. People aren’t generally as frustrated with how features are announced, but with what features are. 2. Why wouldn’t everyone deserve the gift of focus?

A pair of essays has been rattling in my head for a while.

First is Kyle Chayka from October, in “TextEdit and the relief of simple software”:

Over the past few years, I’ve found myself relying on TextEdit more as every other app has grown more complicated, adding cloud uploads, collaborative editing, and now generative A.I. TextEdit is not connected to the internet, like Google Docs. It is not part of a larger suite of workplace software, like Microsoft Word. You can write in TextEdit, and you can format your writing with a bare minimum of fonts and styling. […]

I trust in TextEdit. It doesn’t redesign its interface without warning, the way Spotify does; it doesn’t hawk new features, and it doesn’t demand I update the app every other week, as Google Chrome does.

John Gruber at Daring Fireball responded to it in January:

But I get the feeling that Chayka would be better served switching from TextEdit to Apple Notes for most of these things he’s creating. Saving a whole pile of notes to yourself as text files on your desktop, with no organization into sub-folders, isn’t wrong. The whole point of “just put it on the desktop” is to absolve yourself of thinking about where to file something properly. That’s friction, and if you face a bit of friction every time you want to jot something down, it increases the likelihood that you won’t jot it down because you didn’t want to deal with the friction.

Part of me agrees with this vehemently – for casual text wrangling, Notes is by far the best iteration of what both the old Stickies app and TextEdit attempted.

But Notes are still evolving. The UI keeps changing. I’ve had a note shared by a friend hanging alongside my own notes for years, without me asking for it. I remember the moment when tags were introduced, and suddenly copy/​paste from Slack started populating things in the sidebar. Then there was this scary asterisked dialog that slid so well into planned obsolescence worries that it felt like a self-own:

And the attendant warning, ostensibly well-intentioned, adorned my notes for months, just because I had an older Mac Mini I barely touch doing menial things in a dusty closet:

On top of that, the last version of Apple Notes on my macOS occasionally breaks copy/​paste (!), which led to some writing loss on my part. (If you cut from one note intending to paste in another, and realize nothing was saved in the clipboard, you lost the text forever.)

These are not show stoppers. But they too are friction that has to be juxtaposed with what Gruber lists in his essay. They’re also friction of the unexpected, new, stochastic flavour. TextEdit’s challenges, on the other hand, are known knowns. In this context, TextEdit is in that rare – and maybe increasingly treasured – place where it no longer gets updates, but it doesn’t feel abandoned, or falling apart, or at the risk of outright cancellation. (I think on the inside of tech companies this is called being “maintenanced” – not actually staffed to be improved, but still eligible for breaking bug fixes and security updates.)

A user named Millie captured this feeling recently on Mastodon:

We need to normalize declaring software as finished. Not everything needs continuous updates to function. In fact, a minority of software needs this. Most software works as it is written. The code does not run out of date. I want more projects that are actually just finished, without the need to be continuously mutated and complexified ad infinitum.

And I saw another person, JP, sharing a similar sentiment:

Personally I would be very happy to live in a postcapitalist world where it was 100% FINE that desktop operating systems had “stopped evolving” because they were good enough to meet basically everyones’ needs, and there was no stock price to crash from an old monopoly having clawed its way to the top with nowhere else to go. “Let [certain] software be finished” has always felt to me like oblique pining for humanity to outgrow our current political-economic system.

Even on my crowdsourced list of well-made apps and sites, someone mentioned Bear – interestingly enough another note-taking app – this way:

The fact that in the 10+ years I’ve been using it, there’s only been a single major overhaul update is a feature, not a bug to me.

I have seen this sentiment grow in recent years, as AI is seemingly shoved into every crevice of everything whether or not it even had crevices to begin with. Liquid Glass on the Mac side and incessant ads plus bugs on the Windows side add to the malaise.

But I’ve also been in technology so long that even outside of tensions of capitalism, it’s hard for me to imagine software not changing. Code does run out of date even if you try very hard. So I don’t know yet how to square all this.

Bear is not finished/“maintenanced,” but it seems to not be changing the same way some other software is changing, either. I’m excited reading its blog – even if there are features or updates that do not pertain to me, they don’t bother me, and make me excited for others benefitting. Its innovation feels considered, not reckless.

In a week I’m praising products I didn’t expect to praise, I feel similarly about Lightroom Classic. When Adobe in 2017 forked Lightroom Classic out of the newly-refreshed Lightroom, a lot of us got worried about the “Classic” tag having “dead man’s walking” connotations. But nine years later, and Lightroom Classic is still being lightly updated with fixes, camera presets, and – occasionally – feature changes that largely feel welcome. Lightroom Classic appears, to once again use industry jargon, “stable.”

Maybe the answers are somewhere in this post: celebrate and fund “maintenanced” apps, fork apps into “stable” and “modern” paths, or encourage and practice slow, considered growth. I bet there are other approaches and altogether new ideas to try, too. (There used to be a tradition, when software was physical, to list all the new stuff at the back of the box. What if we started writing out the things we didn’t add?) But I like at least talking about it to begin with. There are apps in my life I want to feel like TextEdit, there are apps that I want to feel like Notes, and there are ones I’m happy to put on the cutting edge/​beta/canary path, where bugs are a promise, and motor memory a distant dream.

I yearn for a software ecosystem that allows all of these types of apps to blossom.