macOS 26.4, released on Tuesday (the 24th), brought back the compact tab layout to Safari (screenshot). The five of us who use this layout — which had been removed in macOS 26.0 — are grateful.
macOS
For me, NetNewsWire is the perfect app for macOS. NetNewsWire 7.0, released this Tuesday (27th), reinforces this distinction. The implementation of Liquid Glass is so good that the app looks better (screenshots), without losing its identity. Extra points for the icon-free menus, mitigating one of the silliest problems in macOS 26 Tahoe. Now I’m looking forward to the iOS version.
People using a Logitech mouse on macOS spent a few hours with limited functionality. An expired certificate for the Logitech Options+ and G HUB apps caused the confusion. The ridiculous issue at least served to help people discover better alternative utilities for this purpose. (The best software, however, is no software; a good mouse works fine without these things, hehehe!)
Liquid Glass
Major redesigns of graphical user interfaces (GUI) always provoke surprise and complaints. With Liquid Glass, Apple’s new visual language, it’s no different.
The good news is that beneath the new buttons, unreadable text blocks and modernized effects, the way you use systems like iOS and macOS hasn’t changed. People familiar with the previous versions will be able to find their way around the new ones.
That doesn’t mean Liquid Glass is a success. At the risk of contradicting myself later, I think Apple missed the mark.
Apple forgot the “Compact” tab layout in macOS Safari
I’m not in a hurry to update my Apple devices to the 26 “crop” of OSs, but Safari on macOS… why not?
Every year Apple ships the big update to its browser for older macOS releases. It’s an exception to the rule of updating native apps only with the OS. The list of changes is always long and this year’s is no different.
Unfortunately, Safari 26 is broken for the five people who use the “compact” tab layout. And yes, I am (or was) one of them.
How to remove “stuck” iCloud Tabs in Safari
Things at Apple work great until the day they don’t. A silly example that really bugs me is “stuck” iCloud tabs on Safari — a glitch in Apple’s tab syncing feature that lets me access tabs from one device on others.
Maestral: An alternative app for syncing files with Dropbox
Remember when Dropbox was a small, snap app only used to sync and store files in the cloud? Good times… Today, it’s a heavy monster packed with corporate features. Perhaps it was necessary, for business reasons, to transform it into this… thing, but that doesn’t comfort those who just want to sync files and keep them in the cloud.
Maestral is an alternative client for Dropbox, open-source, written in Python, and that promises to be lightweight. According to the official website, “it provides powerful command line tools, supports gitignore patterns to exclude local files from syncing and allows syncing multiple Dropbox accounts.” Sounds promising!
For those in the know, in addition to the command line, Maestral offers apps with native GUI (Cocoa on macOS, Qt on Linux). This allowed its developers to create an app that is about 90% smaller than the official one and demands, on average, 80% less device memory. (However, this last figure can vary significantly depending on the size of your Dropbox folder.)
Two important warnings for anyone considering giving Maestral a try:
- Advanced Dropbox features — namely: Paper, team management, and shared folder/directory settings — are not supported.
- Maestral uses the public Dropbox API, which does not support partial file transfers (“binary diff”). This results in a more intensive data usage.
And, of course, keep in mind that it’s an unofficial app.
macOS users can download an app bundle that includes the Maestral graphical user interface (GUI). For Linux, there are two less user-friendly options: via PyPI (GUI optional) and Docker image (command line only). All the information can be found on this page.