Caius Nocturne

iOS 18's icon theming looks rough. I don't give Google many props but their themed icons look fine, even if making good Android themed icons is quite tricky.

In Android, the backing colour is also changeable, so even a near-gray or a black can have a complimentary hue tint (such as in the above picture, which is not a pure black but a very dark reddish brown). Having non-pure darks makes things pop, and makes them feel immersive and really helps set a mood.

Also in Android, themed icons have to be distinct graphics that are made by developers for their apps, this enables them to make graphics that actually function in a monochromatic way.

What makes Apple's dark themed app icons truly bad is the absence of all of these kinds of design considerations.

• No colour sophistication at all. It's just pure grayscale gradient with a single bright colour sitting on top.
• The colours they showed in demos were often very basic primaries and had bad contrast.
• Some app icons seem adapted, but many (such as Find My) really don't seem to be. It seems that it just puts a colour filter over other ones.

I can't help but feel that this was rushed out the door. It takes me back to the app icon designs of the early 00's - early 10's, when people were still working out colour theory in app icons.

Image 1: Apple Maps via Kagi
Image 2: Google Maps
Image 3: OpenStreetMap

Apple Maps is really beautiful, it has a wonderful colour scheme and really nice typography.

It can be hard to appreciate if you just use it on iPhone like I do normally. Using a 1 month Kagi trial a friend gave me so I have the ability to appreciate it a lot more <3

Apple Maps has no standalone web version because the cost of the service is subsidised by its users buying Apple devices.

Apple Maps has a commercial web API for privacy-focused services (such as Kagi and DuckDuckGo), and you can access Apple Maps by doing location-related searches on these services.

I am ride or die for Apple Maps because of its design x privacy, but it does have a lot of incorrect/outdated information about business opening hours. x.x

I am in a very weird position of no longer being a Mac user, but being completely and utterly beholden to Apple's office suite, Numbers (spreadsheet software) in specific.

Numbers is very weird in the fact that it's a spreadsheet software that does not follow the UI paradigm that Excel has established:

• Every sheet is a blank canvas that multiple tables can be moved around on independently, whereas in whereas in the Excel paradigm, the entire sheet is just a grid of cells that you can make look like multiple tables if you kinda fuss around with the colours.
• Controls like formatting and layouts are done in a very simple and well laid out sidebar and you get immediate visual feedback from changes that you make. There is no ribbon, there are no pop-ups or wizards.
• It has things like cell padding controls and an attention to typography and layouts that others I've tried lack.

Every other spreadsheet software I've tried follows the UI paradigm set out by Microsoft Excel. If you're a person who does like accounting or serious number crunching, you probably don't give a fuck about this and you would rather be with the software that has the things in the places that you're used to. I have not heard of another person who would actually rather Numbers than Excel or Sheets lol, but Numbers is really good for me personally, especially as someone who thinks very visually.

Anyway, I don't have a Mac anymore, but I use Numbers on my iPhone and on icloud.com on my Windows computer despite the significantly limited functionality on the web version. If you don't know, Apple is terrible at creating web applications. (This will be important.)

I wanted to use the new E2E feature on iCloud but when it comes to the web applications, what happens is that a decryption request is sent to your phone, and if you accept, a temporary key is sent to the web client to open up your documents. However, this is extremely temperamental and often doesn't work. Instead of going without E2E, I decided to try other XSLX or ODS based spreadsheet editors. I had a terrible time, so I just turned E2E off.

It's kinda cool how spreadsheets are very interoperable for the most part nowadays. Hypothetically, it could make it feasible to move to another software if you wanted. But if you're like me and find yourself just really settling in with a particular kind of obscure software paradigm, you are not fucking going anywhere, buddy x3. A part of me wishes I had a Mac just so I could have the full Numbers desktop experience.