Apple has just announced MacOS 27 (Golden Gate), the next major OS update for the Mac, due out this fall. We’re now hard at work on updates for all of our products, so we can provide full support for Golden Gate ahead of its release.

We Suggest Skipping MacOS Betas

We have long recommended avoiding beta versions of MacOS, and we continue to do so. The smartest path for most users is to stick with the latest officially released version of MacOS 26 (Tahoe), until Golden Gate ships.

If You Do Install the Golden Gate Beta…

All of our current releases already run on Golden Gate. However, the apps have not yet been well tested on Golden Gate, and you may run into issues. Our Status page will be updated regularly to provide full details on support for Golden Gate.

It’s likely that we’ll issue test releases in the coming weeks with updates for Golden Gate. Opt into test releases now, and you’ll be alerted once they’re available.

More to Come

In the months ahead, we’ll have more news regarding support for Golden Gate. To stay up-to-date, check the aforementioned Status page, subscribe to this blog via RSS, and follow us on social media.

Making a Team of Three

At Rogue Amoeba, we’ve always had fast and responsive customer support. For many years, the job was handled by just one person, but it grew to a duo in 2017. That worked well for several years, until the rapid expansion of remote work caused by COVID-19 led to a substantial increase in demand for our products. The corresponding increase in customer support needs meant expanding to a full-time team of three.

When I was promoted to manage the support team, I took the lead in the hiring process. We had multiple good candidates, but Aaron’s prior background in operations made him a strong fit. His genuine care for the people he’d be helping also shone through, and we were glad to have him join us full-time in the spring of 2021.

Since coming on board, Aaron’s done far more than simply help customers. He consistently brings ideas forward — feature requests, suggestions from beta testing, thoughts on how we work internally — with a frequency that speaks to genuine investment in the company. That initiative has pushed us all to think harder about what we’re building and how we’re building it.

Of course, helping customers directly is a big part of the job. I ran some numbers, and found that Aaron has helped over 15,000 users of our products so far in his tenure. That’s an impressive number, and one that increases steadily each day. Beyond the tally, what really stands out is the patience Aaron brings to each conversation, and the care he takes to get things right for the folks who rely on our software.

A Well-Traveled Tradition

We have some traditions in honoring five years of service at Rogue Amoeba, including a one-of-a-kind card from our designer, as well as our famous challenge coin.

We also like to provide a personalized gift. For my five year anniversary, I received a wonderful bag, and we figured it could be a new Support tradition when Robert reached his own five year milestone. However, Aaron’s already something of a bag connoisseur, with a sizable fleet in regular rotation. Given that, we’ve gone with some other travel accessories to complement his collection.

Muito obrigado!

As a virtual company, the employees of Rogue Amoeba live all over the world. From his own home in Portugal, Aaron brings a unique perspective to assisting our global customer base. And while Aaron does receive kind words from our grateful users across email, I also wanted to express our appreciation publicly for the five impressive years he’s had so far here at Rogue Amoeba.

Thanks for everything you do to improve the Rogue Amoeba experience, Aaron! Both our software and our company are better because of you, and we look forward to much more great work together.

Late last year, we unveiled SoundSource 6, the latest and greatest version of our essential audio control utility. This upgrade added substantial new functionality, without drastically overhauling the nimble interface that was already familiar to countless users.

Today, I want to talk about a few of the design puzzles we had to solve while developing SoundSource 6.

Initial Design Inspirations

We advertise SoundSource as “sound control so good, it ought to be built in to MacOS”, and we want it to feel like part of the system. That led us to take some cues from the system-level control centre as it existed when we began work on SoundSource 6. This is the control centre from MacOS 15 (Sequoia):

The visual blocks and sections seen here inspired our own layout. At one point, we even played around with using similar chunky sliders. Here’s how an early mockup of that looked in SoundSource:

That was initially appealing, as the overlapping volume icon in the slider saved several dozen pixels, particularly helpful for our small interface. However, we soon noted an issue with these combined chubby sliders. We use the volume icon itself as a mute toggle. If the level is low, how can we tell if the user is trying to grab the slider knob or click the mute button?

Though we found ways to make it work, we didn’t like the possible confusion it could cause, and ultimately moved away from this idea. We weren’t too surprised when Apple themselves ditched this approach in the control centre in MacOS 26 (Tahoe). Some other changes they made in Tahoe were quite surprising indeed, however.

Enter Liquid Glass

During WWDC 2025, with SoundSource 6’s beta period already in full swing, Apple unveiled their new “Liquid Glass” design language. Where the Sequoia control centre had provided inspiration, the Tahoe control center offered only eye strain:

In addition to losing those overlapping icons and chunky tracks, sliders in the control centre also lost their knobs for some reason, at least until you hover over them. And as you can see, Tahoe’s control centre is both less compact and less legible than the previous version, but at least it’s also ugly.¹ When we saw this change, we quickly determined that SoundSource would not be following in its footsteps.

We work hard to make sure our products look and feel right on the Mac, but we’ve never been afraid to ignore Apple’s lesser design whims.² We want our apps to exist harmoniously alongside Apple’s designs, but they don’t need to match exactly. Notably, the actual glass part of Liquid Glass is something we’re mostly steering clear of in our own designs.

Breaking Our Icon Out of Jail

Liquid Glass wasn’t the only change to be seen in Tahoe. Apple also messed with app icons, necessitating an update to SoundSource’s icon:

This modification was minor, but it was also rather frustrating, as it came due to Apple’s oppressive design approach. To explain, a little background is needed.

Starting with MacOS 11 (Big Sur) in 2020, Apple decided to make all their Mac app icons into squircle tile shapes, matching the look of apps on the iPhone.

Apple encouraged developers to follow in their squircley footsteps. Though having all icons use the same shape makes it more difficult to tell them apart, we did our best to roll with this change, while still retaining a bit of individuality. Some of our icons fit the general squircle shape, but had elements which subtly broke the frame. We stuck with those accents, as they made icons easier to pick out, and gave them a bit more character.

In the image above, the pink area shows Apple’s desired shape. The wand in SoundSource 5’s icon and the mic in Audio Hijack’s old icon broke out of that frame slightly.³

For several years, these icons worked just fine. They fit in with the general aesthetic Apple sought, while maintaining some personality. Regrettably, with Tahoe, Apple decided to enforce their exact desired squircle shape on every single app. If an icon deviated, it was aggressively cropped down and imprisoned on an ugly grey background.

Given Apple’s heavy-handedness, we felt forced to make a change. Though SoundSource’s icon doesn’t show up in the dock, it does show up elsewhere in the Finder, and the grey icon jail makes it smaller and more difficult to pick out. Updating SoundSource’s icon was fortunately pretty minor, with the magic wand just moving into the centre of the icon. Still, it was a change wrought by Apple that we did not relish making.

Concentricity

By contrast, one aspect of Tahoe’s updated design that I’ve been delighted by is concentricity. That’s a jargony way of say that rounded elements in an interface are drawn as if their circular elements share a centre.

To see this in action, look at the following example from SoundSource’s “Quick Configs” menu. Notice how the semi-circle of the selector and the quarter-circle of the app window, if drawn out, would share the same centre:

The visual effect of these concentric circles is just nice. Much as music notes in a chord elevate each other and are pleasing to the ear, concentricity is satisfying to my eye. Tahoe’s focus on it is a refreshing aspect of Apple’s new design. For this particular designer, it shines like a good deed in a weary world, and it’s an element of the new design I was very happy to embrace.

Keeping an Agile App Posture

Beyond dealing with changes Apple made to the MacOS, we also had to solve the challenge of adding substantial new power to SoundSource while still keeping its interface fast and compact. This was no mean feat.

When considering the overall design of an app, it’s often helpful to think about what I call its “posture”, its size and how it carries itself on your system. For example, a big, complex app like Photoshop takes over your whole screen, providing a deep work environment unto itself. SoundSource is almost the polar opposite, a small and streamlined app that mostly runs in the background. It’s something you’ll dip into briefly to tweak a few settings, and then get back to what you were doing.

In SoundSource’s earliest versions, it was positively tiny. Here’s a screenshot from our archives, which shows the entirety of the interface for the first version:

The barebones nature of the original SoundSource made an unobtrusive posture come naturally. Maintaining that lightness in the feature-rich modern SoundSource is much more difficult. In contrast with the above, here’s SoundSource 6’s main window:

Even if you’ve never used any version of SoundSource, it’s obvious from these two screenshots that the app does a lot more for you these days. The recent upgrade to SoundSource 6 added many new features, including audio device configuration options, AirPlay support, and customizable output groups. It took a great deal of thinking, and many mockups and iterations, to fit all that new functionality into our compact menu bar app.

Controlling Audio Devices

One notable example of this iteration was just how we provide the aforementioned audio device configuration options. These are things like adjusting volume, balance, and sample rate for any and all audio devices you have plugged in to your Mac. My first instinct was to add a new “Devices” tab into the app’s “Settings” window. Here’s an early sketch:

While this made some sense in terms of navigation, it shoehorned way too much into a very small space. As we continued to add options to this area, it became less and less workable. Eventually, it was clear that these settings deserved their own window. Thus, the “Audio Devices” window was born:

Moving these controls to a distinct window provided the new features with a solid home, and leaves us room to add more in the future as well. We ultimately added several secondary windows in SoundSource 6. They’re easy to access from the main window, while avoiding making the app feel cluttered. Even with all of its new features, SoundSource is able to maintain its overall lightweight posture.

Wrapping Up

Those were just some of the design challenges that arose during the development of SoundSource 6. Figuring out solutions to them produced the app you see today. While SoundSource’s visible surface area remains small, it’s become a surprisingly deep application when it comes to functionality. The app is part ninja and part knight on horseback, part bicycle and part big rig. I’m proud that we’ve been able to wrap up so much power into such a nimble interface.

When I find myself at a Mac that doesn’t have SoundSource installed, it genuinely feels like something is missing. If you’re already a SoundSource user but haven’t tried version 6, check out the “What’s New” page and download the new version. And if you’re new to SoundSource, head over to its product page to learn more, and download the free trial.

Footnotes:

1. It’s outside the scope of this design breakdown, but I attribute much of the poor design in Liquid Glass to Apple over-centralizing. Beyond the immediate negative feelings toward blurry glass on the Mac, I really don’t like seeing identical visual styles everywhere, from the Mac to the iPhone and beyond. Different platforms have different needs, and require distinct solutions. Too much uniformity can definitely be a bad thing. ↩︎

2. Though Rogue Amoeba has been around since 2002, you won’t find any brushed metal in our past, to cite just one example. ↩︎

3. Worth noting, on MacOS 11 – MacOS 15, many of Apple’s icons included their own framebreakers. These included Preview’s loupe, Automator’s inanimate carbon rod, and Chess’s knight. ↩︎

Though Sparkle serves us very well, it has one notable downside. Update announcements are most likely to appear at the least convenient time: right after you’ve launched the app. You want to start recording with Audio Hijack, for instance, but the app is telling you about a new version.

We’ve long wished to avoid these disruptions. With that in mind, we’re making changes to how update notifications appear throughout our apps. In the future, when the software’s timed automated check detects a newer version, it will no longer pop an obtrusive window like the one seen above.

Instead, a small “Update Available” indicator will be shown in the app’s interface. You can see it right here in Audio Hijack:

This change will provide you with more control over updating. Whenever you’re ready to update, you can click the indicator to be guided through the same speedy process as before. But if you need to get down to business, just ignore the indicator while you accomplish the desired task.¹

These new update indicators have already been added to Audio Hijack and Loopback, and we’ll be bringing them to additional apps in the future. The absence of a disruptive dialog is likely to go largely unnoticed, but it’s a quality-of-life improvement we’re very glad to make.

Footnotes:

1. This indicator is designed to be quite subtle, but we’re mindful that you might wish to hide it entirely. To do so, click the indicator, then select “Skip for Now”. This will hide the visual until the next timed check in a few days. ↩︎

A Temporal Anomaly

Lee’s employment history at Rogue Amoeba could best be described as complicated. He’s done full-time work, part-time work, and contract work. There have been multiple opportunities that pulled him away completely, only for him to find his way back.

When Lee last rejoined the company in 2023, we hoped to incentivize him to stick around longer. We thus told him that if he made it to 2026, we’d mark his 10 year anniversary with the company, some 17 years after he was first hired. Hey, who’s going to stop us?

Lee’s Work

Lee initially handled Rogue Amoeba’s support needs, and like every member of our top-notch support team, he was great at helping customers directly with our products. After a little over a year, however, he switched to a programming role. In that role, he’s been able to have a big impact, in a wide variety of ways. In fact, he’s worked on MacOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android, and our web server. That’s quite the range!

For several years, Lee served as a product lead on the now-retired Airfoil for Windows. On the Mac, he’s also done extensive work on both Airfoil for Mac and our audio editor Fission.

When not focusing on a specific product, Lee has also worked on key components used across apps. To name just one example, the centralized Permissions window he built is found in each of our products, and it’s consistently been lauded by users. When people express appreciation for a Permissions window, you must be doing something right.

Lee has also done a substantial amount of server-side work. If you’ve ever purchased a product in our store, or used our support form, you’ve silently triggered a whole lot of backend systems created by Lee. More visible is our Customer Dashboard, a full-fledged web app he built.

Lee has always been a pleasure to work with, and he’s always improving. Of note, he’s gained the ability to accommodate changing requirements. We work hard to plan ahead, but the full scope of a problem isn’t always clear up front. Lee’s become quite good at iterating so we can get where we need to, and I now view it as a particular strength. In tandem with that, he’s always had a finely tuned sense for quality, and doesn’t stop until he’s met it.

Closing

Lee has been a terrific part of our team for a decade and then some. Seventeen years after Lee was first hired, I’m delighted to be able to celebrate this quirky “ten year” anniversary. Will we celebrate his fifteen year anniversary in a more normal timeframe? I certainly hope so. Check back in 2031.

As you can see in the demo above, clicking on the app’s Dock icon causes its main window to do a horizontal shake. While this is effective in drawing attention, as Wichary notes, this left-right shake already has a well-established meaning. Throughout MacOS, such a shake is used to indicate a password has not been accepted.

We actually tackled this exact problem several years back in SoundSource. The app’s main window can be pinned to remain open on screen. When it is, we wanted a click of the menu bar icon to draw attention to that already-open main window. We began with a left-right shake, much like what you see above.

Eventually, though, I realized it just didn’t feel right to me. The connection to both bad passwords and saying “No” was too strong. So I opened a case in our issue tracker titled “Consider modifying the ‘Here I Am’ shake”, and suggested that perhaps an up-down “yes” shake might work instead.

Nathan, our lead developer on SoundSource, experimented a bit. He eventually got us to the fantastic “pop” animation you can see here:

We released this change back at the end of 2021¹, and it can still be seen in SoundSource today. I recently noticed that Apple’s apps do a similar animation when opening an already-open file.² I remain delighted with this simple but effective pop animation. It feels like something other apps might adopt it as well.

Footnotes:

1. The release note for this read: “…now does a more logical ‘Here I am!’ pop to indicate its location.”↩︎

2. To see this, open an already-open file in almost any Apple app, including Pages, QuickTime Player, or TextEdit. The window for the file will quickly pop once. Though it’s not bad, I feel our double-pop is superior.↩︎

During a recent update to our site’s footer, we fell backwards into a fun little easter egg. It’s easy to miss, so I thought I’d draw a little attention to it here.

When I finished mocking up the site’s new footer, the rightmost column just happened to be shorter than the others, leaving an empty space and making the design look a little off balance. To fill the space, I added an existing drawing of our mascot Ammo. This was intended as a placeholder, but it turned out that everyone liked Ammo there. He made it through the design process to go live on the site.

That wasn’t the end of the story, however, as we were soon led on a fun little diversion by an offhand comment: “He should be dressed up for holidays”. Almost as soon as the words were spoken, a bit of PHP code was implemented to automate swapping images, and I found myself drawing a couple dozen variations of Ammo for a wide variety of calendar events.

One of my favorites is the Saint Patrick’s Day Ammo. My first draft had our mascot dressed as a leprechaun. I was quite satisfied with the drawing, which was relatively detailed for something so small. But after finishing it, I was struck by some inspiration. Just like the Chicago river being dyed green, I realized that as an amoeba, the mostly-water based Ammo could also go green. I threw out my more detailed drawing in favour of a quick colour shift, making an emerald Ammo for St. Patty’s day.

I’ve included a few of the special Ammos in this post, but there are many more for you to spot on various holidays and cultural events. As I post this, the gold medal-winning Olympics Ammo is visible in the footer. Watch our footer over the course of time to see more.

It’s time for new calendars, and that means it’s also time for another annual status report. Today, I’m going to take a look back at what Rogue Amoeba accomplished in 2025, then preview a few of the things we’re looking forward to in 2026. Let’s jump right in!

Software Updates

We’re a software company, so our biggest news ought to be updates made to our software. It was!

SoundSource 6

Our single biggest update in 2025 was SoundSource 6. Hopefully, you already know about SoundSource, which provides instant access to audio settings right from your Mac’s menu bar, giving you powerful per-app control and the ability to apply effects to any app’s audio.

In version 6, we added dozens of helpful new features, alongside countless improvements. When an upgrade is this big, it can be difficult tough to convey all that it contains, so we focused our marketing on four key features: Quick Configs, AirPlay support, grouped output devices, and the powerful new Audio Devices window. You can learn about those, and so much more, on the What’s New page.

Whether you’re new to SoundSource, or just haven’t checked out version 6, download the free trial to check it out on MacOS 15 and higher. And if you previously purchased SoundSource 5 (or even SoundSource 4), you’re eligible for a discounted upgrade to version 6.

Free Updates, Big and Small

In addition to one paid upgrade, we also shipped a whopping 49 free updates across our product lineup in 2025, including three big releases.

With Audio Hijack 4.5, we removed the “Beta” label from the relatively new Transcribe block. That means Audio Hijack’s powerful speech-to-text abilities are now fully supported. This update also made transcription much faster and less CPU intensive.

Fission 2.9 included some notable interface improvements, like a better top navigation bar. However, user feedback convinced us that our choice of new colors was a misstep. We rectified things in subsequent updates, while also improving VoiceOver support.

We optimized SoundSource 5.8 to reduce CPU usage and correct an assortment of rare but irksome issues. The new SoundSource 6 is the current version of the app, but version 5 remains supported for existing users. In fact, it received another bug fix just a few days ago.

Rather than on-going subscriptions, all of our products are sold as one-time purchases. Nevertheless, the apps are always being refined, with a constant flow of free updates. In 2025, we shipped new features, performance enhancements, and hundreds of bug fixes to make all of our apps as reliable as possible. We also invested significant effort on full compatibility with MacOS 26 (Tahoe), ensuring everything was ready when it arrived.

Important MacOS Updates

Speaking of MacOS, we once again found ourselves eagerly awaiting point updates from Apple. While we have full control over our own apps, corrections to problems with the Mac’s underlying audio system can only come from Apple. Both MacOS 15 (Sequoia) and MacOS 26 (Tahoe) saw critical fixes arrive after their initial releases, with important improvements in Sequoia 15.4, as well Tahoe 26.1. We tested those OS updates in beta to validate Apple’s changes, and issued updates where needed.

Celebrating Our Team

We were delighted to have the chance to celebrate two employee milestones in 2025. Our ace designer, Neale Van Fleet, has now been with us for 10 years and counting. In that time, he’s done incredible work to make all that we do look good. Meanwhile, our support manager, Chris Barajas, crossed the 15-year mark. Chris has done more than anyone to make things better for customers. We know we’re lucky to have them both, and we hope our users do too.

One More Thing

One other project worth noting is our new Customer Dashboard. It provides automated access to full details on all your purchases from Rogue Amoeba. Retrieve lost licenses, download the latest version your license can unlock, view your purchase history, and update the email address under which your purchases are stored.

Click to check it out. You shouldn’t need it often, but when you do, the Customer Dashboard will be ready for you.

Updates Big and Small

We’re a software company, so our biggest plans ought to be updates for our software. They are!

First, I’m delighted to spill the beans on a major new feature coming to our audio router Loopback: audio effects! Currently, using effects to make microphone input sound better requires pairing Loopback and Audio Hijack. That’s not as streamlined as we’d like it to be. In the future, Loopback may be all you need to make your mic audio sound great.

We’re aiming to begin beta testing soon, so if you’re a Loopback user interested in testing the next iteration, we’d be glad to have you. Click here to apply, by sending your full name and your favorite food.

At this time, our Loopback beta is full. Stay tuned for more news on updates to Loopback.

After unveiling SoundSource 6 last month, we found plenty to polish in subsequent minor updates. Now, we’re working hard on SoundSource 6.1, a sizable update we hope to ship before spring. It will contain some features that didn’t make it into 6.0, as well as backend enhancements which will reduce latency and CPU usage.

And of course, we’ll be keeping things shipshape in all the rest of our products. The steady procession of free updates to our entire product line will continue apace in 2026.

Still Faster Beta Support

When Apple provided MacOS 26 betas last year, most of our product line worked without needing updates. However, Loopback and SoundSource took a bit more time, because the ARK plugin they use for audio handling required an update for the new OS. Last fall, we decided it was time to change that.

While we’ll continue to counsel caution when running beta OS versions, you’ll no longer need to wait for updates from us just to run the apps. For the first time ever, when Apple provides a beta of the next version of MacOS, you’ll be able to use our entire product line on it from day one. We know our users will appreciate it.

Fascinating Blog Posts

I don’t think I’ve ever teased blog posts in a status report before, but there are two in the works from other Amoebas that I’m personally very excited about. Neale’s design evolution posts are always excellent, so I’m eager to read his forthcoming “Design of SoundSource 6”. Meanwhile, Chris recently spearheaded some customer outreach that’s worth hearing about, and he’ll be posting about it soon.

Staying Up-To-Date

This annual status report is a good chance to reiterate how you can keep up with our latest news. Of course, our apps themselves offer automated update checking, with comprehensive release notes. But beyond that, there’s our:

Mailing List

Want our biggest news? We send just a few emails a year, and your address is never shared. Click right here to subscribe.

Blog

On Under the Microscope, you’ll hear about big updates, smaller updates, and other stories too. Subscribe to the RSS feed in a reader like NetNewsWire, or even get an email for every post with a service like Feedrabbit.

Social Media

You can follow @RogueAmoeba on an assortment of social media sites. We post about nearly all of our updates, provide links to articles on our blog, and share other ephemera.

New Year, Same Rogue Amoeba

We’re well into our third decade of developing the best audio tools for the Mac, and we don’t have any plans to stop. Everyone at Rogue Amoeba is hard at work on multiple updates we’ll be unveiling in the months ahead. It’s time to get back to that, so please allow Ammo and me to close by wishing you a happy new year.

A Bit of Nuance

It’s not that icons in menus are inherently bad. Indeed, they can be helpful in small doses. We use them to good effect in select places throughout our own apps:

The menu icons seen above help differentiate between available options.

Tahoe’s Menu Icons

By contrast, Tahoe’s menu icons are distracting. Their tiny size and monochrome nature make distinguishing between icons difficult even on Retina displays. Apple’s implementation of menu icons across the operating system is simply not good.

Attaching icons to only key items is an idea with some potential, and in the initial Tahoe release, only some menu items had icons. Nevertheless, the inconsistencies in indentation and usage that Nielsen and Prokopov pointed out led to ugly and confusing menus.

Tahoe updates have made things worse, by cramming in more and more icons. It now seems Apple intends for every menu item to have an icon, which just doesn’t scale. The result is unhelpful clutter that makes scanning far more difficult.

Apple’s Mess

We often take a wait-and-see approach when it comes to Apple’s design changes, and we have not added any menu icons of our own on Tahoe. However, Apple has forced dozens of icons into our applications’ menus. We don’t love the result:

The random icons Apple littered about haphazardly made our menus uglier and less usable. Illustrative examples can be found in Audio Hijack and Farrago, which each contain “Import” and “Export” menu items. In Audio Hijack, Apple placed an icon on the “Export” option, but not on the “Import” option. Meanwhile in Farrago, neither item got an icon at all.

In addition to being inconsistent, Apple’s approach feels uncharacteristically heavy-handed. In the past, the company might have led by example in their own apps, while encouraging developers to follow along. But rather than WWDC sessions to educate and assist, they employed an overzealous tactic of running a search and replace on third-party apps, which has produced poor results.

Cleaning Things Up

Since the release of Tahoe, we’ve been stuck with the unattractive menus Apple has imposed upon us. Recently, however, we found we could do better. Thanks to inspiration from our old pal Brent Simmons, we can remove the clutter that’s been foisted upon our apps.¹

Our next releases will remove the icons Apple previously forced into our menus. This will restore clean, consistent, icon-free menus to our products.²

As you can see, the clutter-free menus found on MacOS Sequoia and earlier are possible on Tahoe as well. When we next update our apps, we’ll be retaking control of our menus.

Personally, I hope other developers will follow this example. We can’t fix the entire OS, but we don’t have to perpetuate its problems within our own products.

Footnotes:

1. Brent has provided a more fleshed-out version of his code here. ↩︎

2. If there are folks who prefer to keep these icons on Tahoe, that will be possible. We’re also adding a new “Restore icons in menus” setting in our Debugging windows.

   

   I’ll be interested to see if that gets much use. ↩︎

Back in 2020, we were delighted to celebrate Neale’s fifth anniversary as Rogue Amoeba’s designer. It’s now 2025, and he’s still here doing stellar work. That means it’s now time to celebrate a full decade of Neale Van Fleet!

When you’re using one of our apps, perusing our website, or check in with us on social media, you’re undoubtedly looking at something Neale created. That’s even true of this laudatory blog post, which recycles his artwork from past posts.

Major App Updates and More

Since we last feted Neale, we’ve shipped three massive new app updates, and he led the design of all of them.

When compared against the revolutionary version 3, Audio Hijack 4 was more of an evolutionary update. With over 100 new features, however, it was still a massive design job. Neale rose to the challenge. I always enjoy his design evolution posts, but The Design of Audio Hijack 4 is a particular favorite.

After that came Farrago 2. Neale’s idea to allow the use of emoji on tile faces was a stroke of genius, making it possible for tiles to appear distinct while still maintaining an overall uniform look. He talked about that, and much more, in “The Design of Farrago 2”. That post delightfully details how he managed to make a soundboard app so visually appealing.

We’ve also had dozens of point updates to our apps, and improvements like the sleek new Permissions window certainly didn’t design themselves. A few years back, Neale even went from designer to sound designer when we made the confetti in our License window accessible.

If you’re curious what that means, click the banner to read all about it.

Whimsical Things

We try to have a good amount of fun here, and Neale’s no stranger to that either. You might recall our Historic Screenshot Archive, which displays hundreds of images from 23+ years of Rogue Amoeba software. In addition to helping set that up, Neale also created some fun images to display on social media.

Last year, Neale added a special exhibit dedicated to Ammo the Amoeba. That page features dozens of assorted images of our mascot, and it’s a delight.

Even more delightful was Neale’s series on “The Least Likely Ways to Install Rogue Amoeba’s Apps”, like the goofy floppy disk seen above. If you missed that, you’re really in for a retro treat.

So Much More

Neale’s work encompasses far too much to list it all. Day in and day out, his work is outstanding, and we’re lucky to have him. Our users are too!

A Beautiful Award for Beautiful Work

Long-time readers might remember just how Rogue Amoeba celebrates a 10th anniversary: With a bespoke silver token. Neale’s was once again handcrafted by Quentin in his home forge, and it’s as beautiful as ever.

Neale is a particularly worthy recipient of this award, because he designed the logo it represents. We hope it brings him a feeling of pride., because we’re tremendously proud of his great work.

Closing

It’s an honor to be able to celebrate so many employee milestones here. The team that makes the products you use every day is second to none, and it’s a privilege to be able to work with them for such long tenures. Neale is no exception to that.

So thank you for ten great years, Neale, and here’s to many more to come.