At WWDC, Apple announced its new Liquid Glass design language, which is coming to all of its devices, including Macs. I've been tinkering with the macOS Tahoe 26 developer beta on the M4 MacBook Air for about a day. So far, the aesthetic changes range from slick to slightly overwrought, but the new Spotlight search features are nifty and useful.

There are new touches of glassy transparency all over macOS 26, including the Dock, Finder, widgets, and built-in apps. It's more subtle than on the iPhone, mostly because the Mac's much larger screen real estate makes the Liquid Glass elements more like accents than whatever this mess is supposed to be. I'm not very fond of it just yet, but maybe it will grow on me, like UI changes tend to.

The Dock now has a frosted background that's more translucent than Sequoia's flatter design. The hazy, frozen glass aesthetic also extends to widgets, like the calendar and weather, and drop-down menus - though the latter have much higher opacity. The pop-ups for volume and brightness now use this distorted glass look as well, though they've moved to the top-right corner of the screen instead of being centered above the dock. Frankly, they're ugly, …

Read the full story at The Verge.

When you set up a new camera, or even go to take a picture on some smartphones, you’re presented with a key choice: JPG or RAW?

JPGs are ready to post just about anywhere, while RAWs yield an unfinished file filled with extra data that allows for much richer post-processing. That option for a RAW file (and even the generic name, RAW) has been standardized across the camera industry — but despite that, the camera world has never actually settled on one standardized RAW format.

Most cameras capture RAW files in proprietary formats, like Canon’s CR3, Nikon’s NEF, and Sony’s ARW. The result is a world of compatibility issues. Photo editing software needs to specifically support not just each manufacturer’s file type but also make changes for each new camera that shoots it. That creates pain for app developers and early camera adopters who want to know that their preferred software will just work.

Adobe tried to solve this problem years ago with a universal RAW format, DNG (Digital Negative), which it open-sourced for anyone to use. A handful of camera manufacturers have since adopted DNG as their RAW format. But the largest names in the space still use their own proprie …

Read the full story at The Verge.