Collin Donnell

First Impressions of macOS 26

Yesterday I decided to stop waiting and install macOS 26 Tahoe. It’s a mixed bag.

Everything they added for apps other than the design updates, I like.

I’m a big fan of the Journal app. Having it on macOS is awesome. I’ve never been able to stick with Day One, but for some reason Journal clicks with me. The suggestions it gives are good at reminding me what I was doing, so even if I don’t visit the app for a few days, I can come back and fill in the details.

The updates to Spotlight aren’t huge for me, but what’s there is good. Being able to quickly switch to an app-only list is great for when the app I’m looking for isn’t the top result. I want to play with the actions list more. I’m wondering if having a good launcher for shortcuts will encourage me to use them more. For some reason the built-in clipboard manager only holds onto what you copy for eight hours, so I’m going to keep using Pastebot. If they remove that limitation, I’ll probably try it.

Relatedly, Launchpad has been totally redone and I guess is called “Apps” now. I never used or liked Launchpad to the degree it was hard for me to imagine that other people did. Instead of being a weird fake Springboard for macOS, it’s now a proper app launcher you can filter by category. I’m going to give it a keyboard shortcut and try using it in place of Spotlight.

Terminal is my favorite terminal app. Now that they added better color support and whatever you need for Powerline to run, I don’t see myself needing any others.

The new design language? It’s weird. Almost no third-party apps I use have adopted it, and I don’t know if I want them to. It’s really strange seeing the two styles next to each other, though. Probably they should eventually, but I think it’s going to make Electron apps and others that use custom UI seem even more out of place.

Liquid Glass is definitely better on iOS. At least there it feels a bit alive and I can see what they were going for. On macOS it’s just weird slightly-transparent bubbles everywhere. The new drive icons really bother me for some reason. The perspective is off. They aren’t flat, but they aren’t tilted back the right amount either. It feels like they’re going to tip forward out of the screen.

My review for the design changes is this — mostly not awful, but everything they changed is worse. Every change rests somewhere between neutral and a little bit degraded. Not hugely terrible, but just a little bit less pleasant than before. I guess that kind of adds up.

6/10

October 2, 2025

macOS
What if Humanity?

For most, LLMs are useful for two things. As a search engine, or to work out your own ideas. Other than those, they can be actively harmful — using them for medical advice or therapy. Everyone seems to hate half-baked AI features infecting everything they use.

Who likes it are executives. These ghouls hope that it will somehow let them fire and replace people. It’s clearly not to that level yet. In the short-term, it lets them pretend it can replace humans. They’ll fire people. They’ll make the rest work more to make up for it.

What the rest of us mostly hear is that AI is going to take our jobs. People supposed to be excited by that? OpenAI and Anthropic don’t want to make the world a better place, they want to sell a product. They don’t care about any damage it causes to the rest of us. Executives care about ROI. Maybe they’ll write a letter or fake crocodile tears on a call before rushing off to a yacht trip in Monaco.

My question is this. What if we treated each other with empathy? What if our goal as humans was not acquisition and expansion, but treating each other kindly and with respect? What if our packages showed up in three days instead of two, but no one was pissing in bottles? What if our number one priority was each other, and only secondly speed and efficiency?

I think that world might be better for everyone — including all the little Jack Welches running the world.

August 22, 2025

AI, Capitalism, Society
Mark Twain on the Book of Mormon

Part of Mark Twain’s semi-autobiographical book Roughing It talks about his visit to Salt Lake City in the 1860s. His review of the Book of Mormon is absolutely worth reading, because it’s hilarious. He talks about the overall style is was written in and pulls out many specific sections which he entirely pulls apart.

The beginning of the review gives you a pretty good idea how it’s going to go.

ALL men have heard of the Mormon Bible, but few except the “elect” have seen it, or, at least, taken the trouble to read it. I brought away a copy from Salt Lake. The book is a curiosity to me, it is such a pretentious affair, and yet so “slow,” so sleepy; such an insipid mess of inspiration. It is chloroform in print. If Joseph Smith composed this book, the act was a miracle–keeping awake while he did it was, at any rate.

August 20, 2025
Playdate Development Is Incredibly Fun

For the last couple of weeks, since my post about Playdate Season 2, I’ve become obsessed with learning the Playdate SDK and learning to make games. The project I’ve been working on as a learning experiment is a Breakout clone that uses the Playdate’s crank for movement, which I’ve titled Crankout. I posted the source on GitHub if you’d like to look at it.

Making a simple game like this, which I can continue to expand and improve, felt like a good strategy for learning game development. Part of my approach to learning new things is to pick the simplest version of it I can think of which still demonstrates how something works. If I can’t start using the thing in some form almost immediately, I tend to get distracted and not get very far. My MiniCalc project I wrote in Ruby is another good example of this I wrote when I wanted to try making an interpreter.

What’s making this fun is that game development is a totally new area for me, and that the Playdate SDK is extremely accessible. The SDK is very bare bones, while still having all the pieces you need. If you look at the official documentation, it’s just a list of functions. There’s no engine or anything like that. It reminds me a lot of making games in QBasic when I was a kid.

If you’re interested, here’s resources that have helped me the most, aside from Panic’s documentation.

The Programming in Lua book. Written by one of the authors of the language. It’s short, approachable, and covers everything in Lua. I read this while taking notes in my bullet journal, and by the end feel like I’ve pretty much got it. There’s a couple of parts I skimmed or didn’t bother doing the exercises for, but I know what they are, so I can go back if those things ever come up. It’s a really small language and easy to learn.

SquidGod’s Playdate SDK tutorials. This guy should be on Panic’s payroll. He’s been putting out videos regularly on the SDK for years, and they’re incredible. Probably the number one resource for learning not just the Playdate SDK, but game development patterns as well. He also has a Discord that he’s active in, and he seems like a really nice guy who wants to help people learn.

Eventually I’m hoping to make a real game I can put on the Playdate Catalog, but for roughly two weeks in, I feel like I’m doing pretty well.

August 17, 2025

Game Development, Gaming, Lua, Playdate
How I Learn Things Quickly and Deeply

Something I’ve been told a lot is that I tend to pick things up faster than most. I don’t know if that’s true — maybe everyone does exactly what I do. Maybe there’s a better way. Regardless, I have a pretty good idea of how I learn things, so here’s what that is.

The way most tutorials, guides and lessons work is by breaking things down at a high level into easily digestible chunks. I hate this. I feel stuck at the surface. I’m being told how, but not why. Maybe I’ll be able to do the mechanics of something, but that’s a slow way to expand my knowledge. What I try to do is see past that and find the concept that underlies everything. Once I’ve got that, there might be some specifics to figure out, but I’ve basically learned it.

Here’s some examples.

Let’s say you’re learning scales on guitar — major, minor, pentatonic, whatever. Don’t worry if you play guitar or not, that’s not important. The way this is often taught is by learning five distinct box shapes that you can play in different positions on the neck.

The thing is this — a scale isn’t a shape. A scale is a pattern of intervals. For the pentatonic major scale, that’s whole-whole-m3-whole-m3. Understanding guitar isn’t the point here. The point is that if you know where your root notes are, there aren’t five shapes. There’s just one shape and it repeats up and down the neck. This also means you can play it by going down the neck instead of just up.

By looking at it this way, you’ll also see that the minor pentatonic scale isn’t even a different thing. The intervals for the minor pentatonic are m3–whole–whole–m3–whole. They’re just starting 1.5 steps lower, which is where is the relative minor for your key.

Now I can play that scale any way I want anywhere on the neck, and the shapes don’t matter at all.

Briefly, some computer related examples. How does C work? It’s just mostly about memory and byte manipulation. That’s really all it does.

What is the magic people talk about in Ruby on Rails? That’s just using Ruby’s ability to add methods and change things at runtime to generate things like edit_user_path or whatever, which Ruby can do because it has a dynamic runtime. If you understand what a dynamic runtime and metaprogramming are, there’s no magic at all.

Maybe this is all incredibly obvious, and I’m embarrassing myself by pretending this is a skill at all, but it’s what works for me to learn things on a fairly deep level fairly quickly.

August 6, 2025

Learning, Programming
Freelance Availability for iOS/macOS Development

Looking at my schedule, I’m going to have at least a couple months of availability for freelance iOS/macOS/Ruby work starting immediately. I’m a former Apple engineer (2018-2021); experienced with all of the current app frameworks and technologies. Capable of working on any size project, new or existing.

If you’re working on getting your iOS/macOS 26 updates over the line, now is a great time to bring me on. Get in touch via my Hire Me page and I’ll get back to you right away.

August 4, 2025

iOS, macOS, swift
Playdate Season 2 — Weeks One and Two

If like me, you bought a Playdate when it came out, played some or all of the games in Playdate Season One, and then put it in a drawer, I strongly recommend checking out Season Two.

My issues with season one was that most of the games I played were pretty shallow, and didn’t really hook me (Pick Pack Pup being an exception) after playing them a couple of times. Mostly, they felt like tech demos for the hardware, and many of them used the crank way more than I would have wanted. The crank is kind of like motion controls on a Nintendo console. A little can be fun, but it has to be used judiciously. The only fully crank based game I sort of clicked with was Whitewater Wipeout.

Based on how much I played season one, when I saw season two was $39 for twelve games, I didn’t think I was going to buy it. Cut to me two days later, up late in the guest room of a friend’s house in Salt Lake City. I bought it on a whim.

The first game I played — Fulcrum Defender — felt straight out of season one. Not much to it, and fully crank based. This game could definitely be for someone, but not so much me. The next game I tried was a completely different story.

Something about the game loop of Dig Dig Dino hooked me immediately, and I spent the next three days or so playing it to completion. The conceit is that you are an intern for a group of anthropomorphized animal archaeologists. You dig up dinosaur fossils, upgrade your gear to dig more quickly, break rocks, etc, and put together complete fossils. As you go, you also uncover artifacts, which seem to be slowly telling a story. I won’t spoil it, but things get progressively more insane up until the end. Absolutely this is the first Playdate game that got me hooked like this.

Yesterday, week two showed up, and I started playing The Whiteout, and I think I like it even more. Here’s the marketing line:

The Whiteout is a chapter based, narrative-driven adventure game that takes place in the not-too-distant future. You’ll play as a lone traveler in a dangerous and broken world: society has collapsed, food is scarce, and trust is not affordable.

More succinctly — did you ever wish Cormack McCarthy’s The Road was a sprite-based game on a niche handheld console with 1-bit graphics? Well, that’s what it’s like. It’s fantastic and I can’t stop playing this one either. I haven’t even started Wheelsprung yet, but that looks cool too.

If you also saw the $39 price tag and decided that was too much, or your Playdate has been sitting in a drawer for the last year with a dead battery, I promise you that based on the first four out of twelve games, season two is absolutely worth it.

August 2, 2025

games, Gaming, Playdate, review, video-games
Hide Folders in MacOS Finder

A situation I’ve found myself in twice now is wanting to hide a folder in Finder without making it a dotfile, which would also hide it when using ls. Turns out there is a flag for this. To hide a file from the command line, use chflags hidden. To show it again, chflags nohidden.

I was even able to make a shortcut, so that I can right click and hide a folder from Finder itself — which is surprising, because I’ve never had Shortcuts do what I want with anything involving a shell script. The only wrinkle is that you must — I shit you not — go to Settings and give Finder full disk access.

You have to give Finder full disk access.

Finder is located at /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app, so once you go to Finder > Privacy & Security > Full Disk Access, hit the plus button, navigate to that folder, and select Finder.app. After that, the shortcut works as expected. You can download the it here.

July 18, 2025

Command Line, macOS, Shortcuts
Accounts on title.love

If you ever desired a premium title casing experience (tongue in cheek), you can now sign up for an account on title.love and save your titles. The next feature I’m going to add is being able to set your title casing style preference (AP, Chicago, Daring Fireball), and then probably tagging and search.

This is already becoming a fun playground for me to try different web/Rails things that I can continue to grow into something much more substantial over time.

July 10, 2025

Programming, Ruby, Ruby on Rails
title.love

I put up a small title casing website called title.love built with Ruby on Rails. Right now it is just a single page app with a text field, so it doesn’t really need a back end at all. It was a good chance to try out Kamal however, which, so far, I’m loving. It wasn’t any harder to set up than Heroku, and I can host multiple apps on a $6/month Digital Ocean server.

What I would like to do is expand this into a real website with user accounts and all of that, where you can tag and save your titles. Not that I think that’s a thing a ton of people would use, but it’s a good project for showing off some backend skills. Maybe I will even make a title.love mobile app at some point.

July 7, 2025

Ruby on Rails, Web Development