428: ‘Michigan-Starred Fine Dining’, With Louie Mantia

Louie Mantia—am I saying it right? All right, we’ll Guido it up a little. We were texting Philly food and I said, if Thanos had to snap one Philly sandwich out of existence, lose the cheesesteak, keep the Italian hoagie. Day to day, it is the better sandwich. And what’s with the regional names—hoagie, sub, grinder?

Day to day, I’m with you—Italian hoagie wins. I grew up hearing hoagie, so it just stuck. It’s oil and vinegar for me, not mayo. And I’ve never understood “grinder.” Now I’m starving.

Poll time: on your phone, are you light mode, dark mode, switch by time, or willy-nilly? I’m light mode all the time. People ask if it’s my eyesight or just taste—short answer is both. I had cataracts in my forties, plus a secondary cataract, and dark mode literally let me read when light backgrounds blew out the text. After surgeries, I went back to light. Invert helped back in the day, but true dark mode is better. I still keep BBEdit in dark; code on dark feels right. And I miss when app UIs were visually distinct—yes, even the Corinthian leather—because you could spot an app instantly.

I had corneal cross-linking in both eyes—so yeah, I get the anxiety. Pro apps were doing dark long before the system did. And agreed: apps used to look more distinct; now everything kind of blends.

Real-world wrinkle: at Disneyland at night, I’ll just crank brightness down; I do not switch to dark. Auto-switching throws me—I stop recognizing Mail because, to me, Mail looks like a white app. Safari still flashes white before a dark page loads, which is murder on the eyes. On the web, Daring Fireball’s medium-dark has always split the difference nicely, and I prefer sites pick a look instead of flipping by system. Want to guess the poll results?

Your site’s medium mode works in both worlds. I’d guess about half auto, a chunk dark-only, and fewer light-only. Almost nobody willy-nilly.

Exactly: roughly half auto, about a third dark-only, the smallest group light-only, and barely anyone willy-nilly. Dark mode is not a fad. But iOS 26’s dark-mode app icons? I find it disorienting. The Phone icon flips to a black tile with green glyph and suddenly reads like a different app. It is like making regular Coke cans black; now it looks like Coke Zero. Meanwhile, Watch and Wallet stay dark no matter what. Yet in ads and on Apple dot com, everything is in light mode—probably the nine-forty-one morning screenshot trick.

Dark icons break recognition. Color composition is the icon’s identity—flip foreground and background and my brain says, new app. Notes turning into “black paper” never made sense. The better approach would be darkening backgrounds while keeping brand colors, not inverting. And yeah, Apple keeps pushing tinted icons, which feels like adding noise.

I do like the OS renumbering—calling them all twenty-six is already simpler to talk about. I doubt iPhones will follow; Apple does not want shelves that scream how old a device is. The numbering is already a mess anyway—chips at eighteen, phones at seventeen. The old S-year logic broke, we skipped nine, and the hardware design cycled back to the iPhone four slab.

Most people balance two primary devices. For me, the Mac is for work; the iPad is for sketching with Pencil or relaxing. Touchscreen Macs still feel wrong; if anything, Pencil on a trackpad could be interesting. But I do not want to touch Mac screens.

Same. I tried making the iPad a work machine and the multitasking UI fought me. My productivity jumps on the Mac: windows, big display, muscle-memory shortcuts. That “what is a computer” ad always bugged me—the iPad is a computer, just a different one. Tim Cook will call each product the future in its moment; Joz jokes the real solution is buy a Mac and an iPad.

Quick credential note, because I reject the idea that only practitioners can critique design—Ebert was not a director. But you are a practitioner. Give folks the short version of your background.

I started making Mac customizations and iPhone icons back in two thousand seven during the jailbreak era. At Apple from two thousand ten to two thousand eleven in the Consumer Apps group, I worked on iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, iBooks, Remote, Apple TV—visual design and icons, including the iTunes app icon. It was peak Steve era: he did not micromanage everything, but DRIs knew he might look any week, so standards were high. Dropping the CD from the iTunes icon made sense as Apple moved past discs.

Apple pushes the puck: kill optical drives, stop centering the music app on a disc. Contrast that with PC laptops still shipping VGA for years—dongle chaos at universities. On icons, I never loved NeXT’s hyper-real style—impressive, but too literal.

I’ve grown to appreciate NeXT’s charm. Icons carry a platform’s visual identity, and back when most of the UI was text, icons did the heavy lifting. Aqua on the Mac and Windows XP did the same—bold, distinct icon systems so you instantly knew where you were.

Mac has a look. That blue‑purple, the Finder face, the platinum gray. It is the brand. Folders were metaphorical, but Apple always asks, what if we made the normal thing better and more Apple?

Right, classic Mac blue‑purple versus Windows manila. Apple cannot leave well enough alone—masks, even pizza boxes. It is the mindset: the detail bothers you until you fix it. And like The Bear, imagine Apple doing a hyper‑optimized takeout window.

Cafe Max pizzas were legit. Apple could crush a takeout window. Put Alan Dye on ops and box design and call it a day.

Back to Liquid Glass. Alan Dye comes from brand design, not UI. His keynote was airy corporate speak. Contrast that with Jobs introducing Aqua, obsessing over buttons, sliders, the traffic‑light controls—goals you can feel and test.

As a visual designer, I can like the dock, Command‑Tab, even glassy notifications. The problem is deeper: title bars, sidebars, toolbars, status bars—core structures—are being reworked without a firm grasp of what they are supposed to convey.

Jobs talked about key windows and input focus. Dye’s team rolls their eyes at that nerdy vocabulary—and we got years of iPad split‑screen where you could not tell what had focus.

We solved focus decades ago: color, depth, inactive chrome. Now frosted versus clear glass gets reused with no consistent meaning. Safari even blurs the line between the app’s chrome and a page’s buttons. Users should never wonder what a control will affect.

Good UI teaches. Inactive controls gray out, content stays untouched. Removing scrollbars and depth removed information. NeXT’s proportional thumb added meaning without cost—that is the kind of progress we should be making.

Exactly. More visual tools gave clarity across states and windows. Aqua’s coherence made the system understandable. Flattening took away states and legibility.

And disappearing chrome disrespects the app. An empty Safari window should still scream web browser. The skeuomorphic Voice Memos reels and iBooks page turns made people want to use them. Fun and clarity are not opposites.

iOS 26 feels more polished than macOS 26. On the Mac, toolbars floating above content make no conceptual sense. It feels like people designing this are not living on the Mac.

I once asked Dye about the Apple Watch hands’ shadow and light source. He had not thought about it. That told me the auteur is missing. Quality rises to the taste of the one person who says yes or no, and I do not see that person in Apple’s UI today.

We need a vision holder. Under Steve, teams happily served a clear vision. It is Wes Anderson rules: everyone aligns to a tight palette, even if they would not dress that way themselves. Aqua was opinionated but adaptable, so pro apps could still feel pro.

That Tiger through Snow Leopard era was a golden age—playful consumer apps and serious pro apps coexisted. Early Final Cut looked masterfully pro; iMovie felt approachable but not toy‑like.

Because the shared system had richness, GarageBand’s wood and Aperture’s graphite still felt native. Early iOS skeuomorphism taught and delighted—it made people want to touch and learn.

Covers matter. Apple’s Liquid Glass icon clear mode homogenizes brands, and auto‑redrawing third‑party icons overreaches.

I draw icons for a living. Not every app can reduce to a single glass glyph. Color and material are brand. Clear mode erases identity.

Will there be a backlash? Maybe like last year’s Photos. Many will blame the shiny look, but the deeper issue is UI. People feel friction even if they lack the vocabulary.

Some will not notice. Power users will. Music readability and the Photos tab redesign already showed how confusing this can be.

Apple now adds toggles like unified versus classic in Phone. Real customization used to be AppKit’s Customize Toolbar and the original iPhone OS More tab—adjust how it works, not just how it looks.

Shortcuts are not a real substitute for built‑in UI affordances. Skipping Customize Toolbar is lazy when you need places for features and discoverability.

There is hope in widgets and the lock screen—more functional, flexible, and they look cool. Irony: the lock screen is now the most customizable surface on iOS.