Rob Fahrni

The Iconfactory Blog

Linea’s interface has been updated to feel right at home on iOS 26 and Liquid Glass. Today’s update emphasizes your canvas while keeping tools just as accessible and intuitive as ever.

Redesigned transformation handles make it more obvious how to scale, rotate, and adjust your selections, reducing friction when refining your work.

Congratulations to my friends at The Iconfactory! 🥳

There are four apps I absolutely love from The Iconfactory; Wallaroo, Tot, Tapestry, and Linea Sketch. I admit I don’t have Linea Sketch because I don’t have a modern iPad, but if I did I could see using it for block diagrams of all kinds.

In fact, I believe, The Iconfactory crew should do Linea Diagram, a Visio-like diagramming app for Mac and iOS. (Yes, I’m biased because I worked on Visio for 10-years. Best job I’ve ever had!)

Then you’d have the Linea family of apps! ❤️

Tom Warren ⦁ The Verge

US employees whose combined years of service added to their age totals 70 or more will be eligible for voluntary retirement, and Coleman says this will include “generous company support.” It’s not clear if this is a precursor to more layoffs at Microsoft, but it certainly looks like a method to avoid a bigger round of layoffs ahead of Microsoft’s new financial year in July.

Emphasis is mine. If I’d stayed around Microsoft until now I’d be able to retire. Take my 58 years plus another 30 years of employment (if I’d stayed) and I’d be taking that offer. 😄

My first go round with Visio was in 1993, I left for a spell and returned in May of 1996. Visio was acquired in November of 2001 and I left in August 2003 because I was a remote employee and Microsoft “moved” my job location to Redmond. I took the severance package.

There is this weird part of me that wants to go back to writing cross platform C++. All of my cross platform work was for Windows and Linux. The itch has been there since I moved to iOS code — and I spent [two years in between iOS dev jobs working on a cross platform SDK for Pelco’s video encoding, decoding, and recording devices, all in C++. It never made it to Linux but I spent a whole lotta time working on Pelco’s X SDK. That was our version of a cross platform SDK we used internally to build a cool pipeline framework called MPF, or Media Processing Framework.

Why the draw. I’m not sure, but I think it’s probably because it’s the language I know best and I did a lot of work with the Windows API, which was also a strong suit.

I still haven’t, and don’t think I ever will, embrace the Mac like I did Windows. At the time I was a Windows dev the platform was simple, before COM and OLE 2.0. The Windows API was so straightforward.

None of that is true any longer. Not for Windows or C++. I bet I wouldn’t even recognize modern C++. C++ 11 changed A LOT in the language and it’s only advanced since. As for the Windows API, folks still use it but you should be doing something different, like using WinUI 3.

The thing is, I REALLY want to complete Stream for Mac and my new super top secret project: Rooster. Yeah, it’s not so top secret, and I finally gave it a code name, but if you know me you can probably suss out what it would be given my love of blogging.

My dreams always include one of the places I love; Seattle, Exeter, or Lindsay.

Lately, instead of dreaming of my time at Visio in Seattle I’ve been dreaming about returning to Microsoft. Did that last night.

Brains are weird. 🧠

Here’s the Visio for Mac splash screen, thanks to Chris Roth, a long time Visio Developer.