raphael

just setting up my twttr

@raphaelsalaja @luciascarlet library page needs some padding

the web has been quiet for a while. for the past few months i've been building something to fix that. declarative audio for the web. describe a sound as plain data, play it with one call. → audio.raphaelsalaja.com

Re-created the liquid glass Apple promised but didn't deliver

@immasiddx just plug in the phone to mac

Every iOS app should have a “Clear Cache” button. This would fix storage issues for so many people. 😭

started with a raspberry pi, now i run an entire AWS region at home

proof of work is not mutuals

@Samaytwt you can just do things.

Unpopular opinion : Building side projects teaches you more than any tech degree.

@johanthorell will be very interesting if the words could turn into pixie dust like telegram’s delete animation

@raphtlw Right, yeah prompt can probably be improved

I've spent years trying to find a journaling app that sticks. None of them did, so I built my own. Meet Vyst: a minimal, distraction-free space for journaling and jotting down thoughts, now available for iOS. Download here: vyst.app

@johanthorell didn’t add a . after “super clean”, but it’s not really a complete sentence so it’s fine

@raphtlw Thanks! Didn’t the AI polish work for you?

@johanthorell doesn’t pick up things like this, but i’m sure it’ll be ironed out over time :) solid work!

@johanthorell just bought. can’t wait to try it!

@adityaonx @willmcgugan it’s not. it gives visual separation.

@willmcgugan If we go that way then mac os is way lot shittier with the menu bar, the whole system of menu bar is flawed, having the background straight from wallpaper and not from the active window or maximized screen. A that 1-Pixel gap between menu bar and window is absolute disaster.

This is the kind of pedantry that you need in UIs. Bad UI is everywhere. But it can be fixed.

i’ve hit my rate limits

@unit_accord @BetaProfiles blocked for AI

@raphtlw @BetaProfiles [citation required]

iOS 26 is laggier than iOS 18 when Low Power Mode and screen recording are enabled at the same time.

@BetaProfiles halfing it would look weird

@BetaProfiles because iOS 26 was written with 90hz as the default

Let me explain exactly why Apple still uses drag-to-install in 2026, because the joke here accidentally proves Apple right. A macOS .app is a single self-contained folder disguised as a file. Every dependency, every framework, every resource lives inside it. Drag it to Applications, it works. Drag it to Trash, it's gone. No registry entries. No leftover DLLs. No uninstaller that misses half the files. Windows installers scatter fragments across Program Files, AppData, the registry, system32, and a dozen temp directories. Uninstalling a Windows app is an archaeological dig. Five years later you're still finding config files from software you forgot you owned. Linux is worse. Dependency hell is so common they named it. Entire package managers exist to solve the problem of "I installed something and now nothing else works." Flatpak and Snap were invented specifically to copy what macOS bundles already did natively. The macOS bundle architecture came from NeXTSTEP in 1989. Steve Jobs brought it to OS X in 2001. The core design hasn't changed because the core design was correct. An app is a folder. Installation is a copy. Removal is a delete. Three operations that map perfectly to how humans already think about files. The drag-to-install window with the arrow isn't lazy UX. It's the entire thesis of the system made visible. You are literally just moving a folder. There is no "installation" step because there's nothing to install. The app is already complete. Every other OS eventually tried to get here. Windows got MSIX. Linux got Flatpak. Mobile figured it out from day one because phones shipped after Apple proved the model. The pattern everyone else converged toward is the pattern this tweet is calling outdated. The funniest part: the app being dragged in that screenshot is Claude. An AI that can write code, analyze documents, and reason about complex systems. And the most advanced step in getting it onto your machine is holding down a mouse button and moving your wrist two inches to the right. That's not a design failure. That's a 37-year-old architecture so good that the most sophisticated software on earth still ships inside it.

@AdamKPx unfortunately it doesn’t look like this in actual usage

Liquid Glass still feels unreal 😮‍💨

back when apple was peak