I have to admit that when a reader wrote to me and said…

Every point release of BBEdit delights me. I live in BBEdit. It’s one of the few packages for which I read through the release notes every time (they often have spots of hilarity).

…I got a bit concerned. One thing that I hate more than wasted release notes (“Bug fixes and performance improvements” is the boilerplate’s boilerplate) is funny release notes – the ones where instead of actually conveying what changed, the text field is used for something, erm, “creative.” (Perhaps most infamously, Medium had had a spell of “fun” release notes about 10 years ago, to a mix of amusement and blowback).

But I needn’t have worried. The release notes of BBEdit are just plain old solid good work, with only a sprinkle of humor:

• The “Zoom” command makes a triumphant return to the Window menu.
• Fixed crash which would occur when displaying completions from language servers which violate the published specification and provide something other than a string for the details field of a returned completion item. (glares at Solargraph)
• SNUCK IN A SPECIAL FEATURE FOR CRAIG NO NOT HIM THE OTHER ONE I HOPE HE LIKES IT

It’s been a while since we looked at release notes, and these are a great example of something that can help you understand not just what an application is, but what it will become. For example, I saw this fly by…

• Made a change in the minimap so that punctuation isn’t greeked, which helps improve visualization.

…and even though I have never used BBEdit, I immediately started nodding. It made sense; greeking is helpful for letters, but I can see how it can do more damage than good for punctuation that has a pretty specific visual signature. BBEdit’s author knows what they’re doing.

Another person (whom you might recognize) chimed in to say:

Nothing in BBEdit is “abandoned.” Everything is on the table for possible improvements. Also remember that this is an app that was originally written for classic Mac OS!

This made me think about what separates apps that you’re excited to keep growing from the apps you’d rather see frozen in time.

The release notes of BBEdit made me trust it so, so quickly. Not just the pace of change and clarity of communication, but also indeed this certain feeling that the product is “alive” in all the right ways. Even if I don’t know or use the features, I quickly get a sense that the changes are for me, or at least other people like me, rather than serving unspecified corporate needs, chasing fashionable trends, or pursuing unnecessary pivots. Hell, even the ratio of changes – new features vs. quality-of-life fixes vs. performance improvements – seems good.

On top of all that, it’s fun to read good release notes, because you can learn something new. These, to me, were fascinating:

• “Entab” and “Detab” have had their names changed to “Convert Spaces to Tabs” and “Convert Tabs to Spaces”, respectively. This is more verbose but less abstruse.

Jargon!

• There is a new setting in the Keyboard preferences: “Enable macOS “Help” key”. This is off by default, so that pressing the “Insert” key which is present on some PC-style keyboards doesn’t open the in-application help. (This frequently happens accidentally.)

Keyboards!

• If an FTP browser window is active and disconnected, “Open from FTP/SFTP Server” will start its connection sheet, rather than doing nothing.

Determinism!

Before I say anything, I’d recommend you just visit the site of a new little app called Liquid Radius, click around, and see how you feel (don’t install it, though!):

So. One of the design memes surrounding macOS 26 Tahoe from last year – the one with Liquid Glass – was this screenshotted quagmire of mismatched rounded corners:

The tool, Liquid Radius, promises a solution, and then goes to strange lengths to accomplish it.

Fixing the mismatched radii is, apparently, much harder than for example something like Lickable Menu Bar, which many of you have spotted me using via various Unsung screenshots. To get Liquid Radius to work, you have to take a pickaxe to deep recesses of your operating system in order to disable some of Apple’s protective measures – stuff like FileVault (which you have to turn off momentarily) and System Integrity Protection (which you are never allowed to turn back on). The installation requires friendliness with command line and a stomach for multiple reboots, including some of a kind you might have never actually done before.

Then, there’s the website you’ve just seen: elaborate, with nice “before and after” animations, and a fun landing page. I thought the installation steps, given the complexity of the effort, were exemplary and even educational. There’s also a page listing all the apps confirmed to work, and a “How Liquid Radius limits its blast radius” (ha) section, revealing the author is clear-eyed about their work being a hack, and even the dimensionality of its hackiness. Even within the tool there are nice design details.

But, as I was exploring the site, I kept switching between “this is ridiculous!” (laudatory) and “this is ridiculous!” (derogatory) in my head.

At some point it all started feeling like… overkill. Is this really worth all this effort? Are there people who pay for and install this, lowering their system’s overall security and installing unknown code by unnamed developers? Do the ends justify the means? How much do rounded corners matter?

I’ve also seen many products that were a lot more complex, but came with smaller landing pages and fewer snappy taglines. At some point I even had this thought that if you wanted to make The Onion-style joke describing how designers can get incredibly self-serious and obsessed about some teensy detail, the site is exactly what you would do. You’d just never build the actual app.

(Caveat: I didn’t buy or install Liquid Radius for reasons that are probably obvious – nor would I recommend you do so – so I cannot fully discount this actually being an incredibly sophisticated practical joke.)

Maybe it’s my reaction to rounded corners in particular being its own exhausting thing in the design world – a shiny, shallow distraction of product designers in lieu of focusing on more important issues of utility, ethics, privacy, and so on. Maybe it’s the fact I’ve always been suspicious of the oft-told Steve Jobs round rect story: sure, round rects are everywhere in the world, but then so are regular straight corners. Or maybe it’s my own frustration that conversations about macOS and Liquid Glass still feel largely surface-level, on terms established by Apple at WWDC last year.

Speaking of this: timing-wise, Liquid Radius is peculiar, too. This effort was only launched in May, and graduated to 1.0 on the first day of WWDC, the same moment Apple announced they will fix this problem in the upcoming macOS Golden Gate – to audience’s applause – which renders Liquid Radius obsolete, and was an absolutely predictable outcome.

The Liquid Radius creator seemed perhaps surprised by it, and promised to keep the tool running, allowing people to continue customizing their border radii even after Golden Gate makes them all match – but that makes the product an even trickier proposition given the frightening installation steps and the very notion of anonymous, closed-source code being allowed straight into your system’s bloodstream. Besides, if you judge the tool on its own, visual-design terms…

…I don’t think you can simply straighten the corners like they’re showing in the bottom row without rebalancing it with other design changes I’m not sure the tool can make en masse for all the apps.

I know this is navel-gazing, so I will stop. I linked to some third-party fixes before, but this one is newly fascinating. I’m sharing this in part because I don’t know how to feel about it. It reminded me of the mixed feelings I had after watching Jiro Dreams Of Sushi: is Jiro a hero or a villain of this story? I couldn’t say then, and I still don’t know today.

It has been an interesting few weeks to ponder the relationship of style and substance. macOS Golden Gate announcements made me wonder: if you strip Liquid Glass of a lot of its original style via all the reactionary fixes, is what remains even worth the name? The controversial Ferrari Luce reveal not long ago was another rich entry point, especially as for Ferrari the style is a large part of substance.

I’d be curious how Liquid Radius feels to you.

I thought Safari’s release notes are pretty good – exhaustive, direct, something you won’t ever read for pleasure, but something you can actually learn a lot from even if you are just scanning.

I wish either MDN or Can I use… integrated them in some way (and, of course Chrome’s and Firefox’s as well), so that looking up a certain feature or property – for example, will-change – would show you the recent changes in browsers in reverse chronological order, which could help you understand the details of the feature evolving, and help with debugging.

I saw this screenshot the other day (link):

I never particularly liked those “cute” app updates that were all the rage some… 10 years ago? Or app updates that are too generic. I always felt the updates should be informative, and I occasionally like seeing what’s actually being fixed, and sometimes learning from it.

The post above is about a game called Dwarf Fortress that I have never heard of, despite it going on since 2006. In that game, actual descriptions of bug fixes often feel better than those creative app updates. Some examples:

• Zombies start conversation with necromancer adventurer who tries to sleep in their house
• Cats dying for no reason - alcohol poisoning?
• Giraffe is trainable for war
• Added mouths

PC Gamer some fun ones in 2016, or you can just go to Dwarf Fortress Wiki and explore on your own.

The game seems fascinating, by the way.