Nathan Manceaux-Panot
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cykele.ro
Nathan Manceaux-Panot
@cykele.ro
71 followers 35 following 73 posts
Loves building tools, making art.
Doesn't know how to compromise.
Values kindness greatly.

Building @retcon.app, the macOS app for effortlessly rewriting Git history.

Blog: https://pending.design
Links: https://cykele.ro
Posts Replies Media Videos
cykele.ro
Has anyone seen this? It seems like on the Watch, Live Activities sometimes show up as an overlay, on top of the current app. (rather than showing up just in the Smart Stack)

But last time it happened, for a different app, I swiped it down, and it never came back for that app.
Screenshot from the Apple Watch. The music app is opened, but on top, at the bottom of the screen, a live activity is displayed: a person icon, and a duration of 13 seconds.
October 30, 2025 at 6:28 PM
cykele.ro
Tried this rough diff highlighting tweak on a whim, and it feels like there's something to it?

Lines which Retcon managed to match (a delete with an add) are gray, with only the inline highlights in color. Makes it easier to spot the highlights, and also to know when there's none.

Thoughts?
A diff with a few changes, rendered as described.
October 21, 2025 at 4:23 PM
cykele.ro
My HomePod mini would erratically play/pause music on its own. Turns out, the screen was detecting phantom touches—eventually it even got into a reboot loop, as if touch was constantly held down.

A friend came by and *unplugged the touchscreen* as a fix. Radical buttttt I use Siri anyway!
A glass desk with objects strewn about: a phone, rolls of tape, tools, HomePod pieces, and an open HomePod mini in the middle, that. It’s a black plastic sphere with a circuit board exposed, and a large, translucent circular piece of white plastic, covering up LEDs. Someone is prying something out of the HomePod using a long plastic tool.
October 18, 2025 at 9:39 AM
cykele.ro
A really cool accessible map of the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie, at La Vilette in Paris. It's not just usable by people with low vision, it also looks super rad!
A map on a small pedestal, outside. It’s made out of metal painted black. It shows the place’s various areas—walkways, vegetation, water, etc—as various heights of the metal. Some area types have their own pattern, such as a grid of raised divots for vegetation, or indented circles for water. Some of the buildings are actually represented in volume. The map legend juxtaposes text and symbols printed in white, and braille and shapes made of raised or depressed metal. The north is indicated by a white arrow pointing down, that is replicated as a raised metal arrow. The map is signed “Soufflet gravure”, https://atelierveroliv.fr/. The same image as before, but zoomed more closely onto the map itself.
October 16, 2025 at 1:26 PM
cykele.ro
Added a small callout animation to pending.design/ for when you click a footnote backlink!

(doesn't seem to be working on iOS, though. weird)
October 14, 2025 at 1:42 PM
cykele.ro
Yeah, that’d be much nicer! For instance I had to disable this tweak on iPhone, because the bottom bar also gets tinted, and looks terrible
October 4, 2025 at 5:56 PM
cykele.ro
Just tweaked my blog so that Safari's toolbar blends into the page. Look at that expansive sky 😌
pending.design

(only on Mac and iPad, because that made the bottom bar look strange on iPhone)
Screenshot of https://pending.design in Safari, on macOS 26. The toolbar is white, visually separating it from the sky that's just below, at the top of the page. Screenshot of https://pending.design in Safari, on macOS 26. The toolbar is blue, visually blending it into the sky that's just below, at the top of the page.
October 4, 2025 at 9:10 AM
cykele.ro
In Preview in iPadOS 26, you can drag the loupe around, complete with zoom and color aberration effects. Feels like a tiny dose of the old Apple whimsy.
September 28, 2025 at 9:29 PM
cykele.ro
The iOS keyboard now tells you the name of each emoji you insert, so you know how to search for it later. Cool! 😃⌚️📼🌀🛜🈁
September 28, 2025 at 7:00 AM
cykele.ro
How am I expected to build Liquid Glass icons when Icon Composer won't even run on my Mac?!
A screenshot of the macOS Finder. It’s showing the contents of a folder named “Graphics_Tools_for_Xcode_7.2”. In it, there’s a few apps, notably one named “Icon Composer”. That app has a large “can’t run” sign on it, however, and sports a pre-Big Sur icon.
September 25, 2025 at 6:08 PM
cykele.ro
So, how's everyone's Tahoe Dock looking? Not a lot of squircle jails over here, surprisingly.
Screenshot of a macOS Dock. A bunch of apps; the only three in squircle jail are CodeRunner, Retcon, and Pixelmator Pro.
September 16, 2025 at 3:53 PM
cykele.ro
Hard to believe how voluminous hard drives used to be; all that for just a few gigs!
A large, gray storage container, in the corner of a park. There are various yellow inscriptions on it. Amongst other numbers, the most prominent label reads “12GB”.
September 15, 2025 at 2:05 PM
cykele.ro
Here’s a secret variant to Retcon’s icon! It’s used when running a dev build directly from Xcode, for easy differentiation.

I tried to emulate Apple’s dev app icons, for an in-development feel. The pen actually has better contrast than in the release version, and really shows off its plastic shine!
Two icons of Mac app Retcon. On the left, the icon used by the official releases: a purple eraseable pen in front of a square whiteboard with purple corners, on which a symbol is drawn. The symbol represents two Git branches, the second one being dashed. The icon is stylized but rendered realistically: the pen has reflections, the metal grain and shine. On the right, a icon that’s superficially similar. It has almost exactly the same dimensions and layout, but it represents a blueprint. On the blueprint, white lines draw the shape of a whiteboard, and the same branch symbol. There is also some text written vertically on the left, reading “DESIGNED AND BUILT BY CYKELERO”. Above the blueprint, there is the same realistic pen as in the left icon, but without its purple label.
September 12, 2025 at 1:47 PM
cykele.ro
Look at that hammer!
A comparison between the Beta 7 and RC versions of the Xcode 26 icon. The former features a glassier, less defined hammer, whereas the latter has slightly more differentiated materials between the handle and hammer head. Also, the old icon had a more complex grid behind the hammer, with a couple of circles that are now gone.
September 10, 2025 at 9:41 AM
cykele.ro
Apple in 2009: "text selection in Preview is now AI-powered"
September 9, 2025 at 3:10 PM
cykele.ro
Small new @retcon.app feature: as of 1.4.2, released yesterday, you can now toggle multiple selected files in one click. Neat!
September 8, 2025 at 12:11 PM
cykele.ro
That's certainly how it ended up, but I never realized Snow Leopard's motivation was explicitly to remedy degrading software quality!
(from a Bertrand Serlet interview: youtu.be/qpIuIImN0YI?t=7391 )

Well, we're pretty overdue for that sort of thinking to come back (please)
September 4, 2025 at 9:42 AM
cykele.ro
@sketch.com lets you rename multiple layers at once, and the UI for that is so nice!

It's very flexible, with a lot of options (even has regex matching); despite this it's very compact, and understandable; and it shows a clear summary of what the result will be exactly. Interaction design excellenc
Screenshot of a window of Sketch, a macOS design app. Title: “Rename Selected Layers” Subtitle: “Change the names of all selected layers.” There’s a Match field (currently empty, marked as optional) There’s a Rename field: currently its text is “Text frame”, along with a “Number ↑” token. Below the rename field, there’s a few token buttons: Name, Sequence, Size. Next to these two fields, there’s a couple of buttons: one is a gear icon, and the other says ”123”. A popup is open, pointing to the 123 button. In it, there are two fields: “Start from” (value is 1) and “Increase by” (value is also 1). These fields have steppers, to quickly change their value. Finally, the window contains a table, with two columns, “Before” and “After”. The table has two rows: - Before “Stack”, After “Text frame 1” - Before “Stack”, After “Text frame 2” At the bottom of the window, there’s a Cancel and a Rename button.
August 14, 2025 at 4:22 PM
cykele.ro
Really neat feature in the latest Nova update: case-preserving Find & Replace. I don't think I've ever seen that elsewhere!
Open Quickly in Projects. Access to all of your projects is at your fingertips, whether they're saved in Nova's launcher or specific folders you define in Workspace settings.
July 25, 2025 at 2:35 PM
cykele.ro
Mildly interesting stats: what do Retcon users choose as their auto-update setting?

The choices are "don't do anything", "only notify me of updates", and "automatically install updates".
A donut graph, showing roughly: 10% none, 55% checkOnly, 35% install
July 3, 2025 at 10:29 AM
cykele.ro
Love that I can type "edit" in Alfred to see a bunch of pens and pencils and all
Alfred search, with “edit” as a search term. All of the results are apps; most of them feature a tool prominently.
June 24, 2025 at 8:23 PM
cykele.ro
The LG logo, but modified. The logo itself is almost identical to the original one, but rendered using Apple's new Liquid Glass appearance. And, the text next to the logo says “LG: Liquid Glass”
June 18, 2025 at 9:50 AM
cykele.ro
Wait, they've updated the mouse cursor! In macOS!

This is the first time they've changed it since the Retina transition in 2018, or arguably since the first Mac OS X itself, 24 years ago. Dang!
A comparison of the Sequoia and Tahoe cursor. The latter is noticeably rounder, but still keeps the iconic black-outlined-in-white-with-a-shadow look.
June 10, 2025 at 2:59 PM
cykele.ro
The disconnect is strange: Apple keeps talking about putting the focus on content rather than chrome; but the new UI elements are literally the most prominent thing in the new design. Raised sidebar, raised toolbar buttons—aesthetically these are nice, but they're so attention-grabbing?!
Screenshot of a macOS 26 Finder window. Its UI elements are drawn as if made of glass, standing out far more than the file list or even the window title.
June 10, 2025 at 11:34 AM
cykele.ro
Understated, but effective: Retcon's sidebar looks system-standard, but is actually a lot more opaque than the default.
This makes commit titles much more comfortable to read, while still looking at home on modern macOS.

(a perfect time to post about this, as it'll likely become obsolete on Monday)
A split screenshot of Retcon, showing the default translucency, compared with the tweaked one. Text is easier to read on the more opaque background.
June 5, 2025 at 5:40 PM