Glass, badge, blërg

Behold Liquid Glass in all its whatever. Horrible, ain’t it? Or to use an outdated catchword: blërg.

[Used with permission.]

Elaine put iOS 26 on her phone and granted me permission to share this screenshot. I see so much unused space: not even a short URL will fit in the address bar. And the keyboard? Someone left it out in the rain. With the cake. Yes, iOS MacArthur Park might be a good name for the updated operating system.

Did you notice what looks like a speck of dirt in the lower-left corner of the screenshot? That’s a bit of text left unblurred. I will invoke Liz Lemon: blërg.

After Elaine took this screenshot, she reduced transparency and increased contrast and finds her phone usable with those changes. Here, from OSX Daily, are eight suggestions for improving iOS 26 on the iPhone and the iPad. You have already read about two of them here.

If you decide to stay away from Liquid Glass for now and turn off automatic updates on any Apple device, you still get an annoying red badge on the Systems Settings icon to let you know an update is waiting. On the Mac, old tricks to remove the badge no longer work, but with a little courage, you can use a tiny (free) app to make the badge go away: Software Update Red Badge Remover. Just follow the directions, which may require executing a command in the Terminal. But the fix is temporary: the badge will return. And then you can run the remover again. Blërg.

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Adam Engst’s suggestion to create an Automator workflow application might offer a permanent solution. I’m waiting to see what happens.

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The badge returns. The only way to remove the badge might be to remove the icon from the Dock or use an alias. Adam Engst explains at the link above.

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[Blërg might be passé (I wouldn’t know), but our household recently made our way through 30 Rock, so it’s new to us.]