A few months ago, a developer remembered the NS Drawer. Maybe you remember it too — that sliding panel that emerged from the side of a Mac window like a stubborn colleague leaning over your shoulder. It was clunky. It was weird. Apple killed it years ago, and everyone moved on.
Except this developer didn’t move on. He dug into the deprecated guts of macOS, found the Drawer still breathing, and built a full Mastodon client around it. Not a prototype. Not a proof of concept. A real app.
And that single act of delightful stubbornness exposes something most of the software industry doesn’t want to admit.
We didn’t standardize on good design. We standardized on safe design — and we’ve mistaken the beige box for the horizon.
Open your phone. Every app has the same rounded corners. The same sans-serif typeface. The same “clean” layout that was meticulously A/B tested into total submission. Korean beauty brands have more distinct packaging than modern software.
The MacStodon client is not a perfect app. Let’s be honest — it has a tilted interface. The developer literally named it “MacStodon,” and the tilt is part of the charm. But one commenter nailed the problem: “The tilt is fun, but makes it uncomfortable to read… After the novelty wears off (about two seconds in) it becomes actively annoying.”
That commenter is right. And that’s exactly why this matters.
Because the answer isn’t “tilt everything” or “bring back every deprecated API.” The answer is that someone had to build a weird, tilted, slightly uncomfortable app to remind us that design is a set of choices — not a prison sentence handed down by a design system committee.
The most radical thing a developer can do in 2025 is make something that feels like a human made it.
Here’s what the MacStodon story actually proves:
Deprecated doesn’t mean dead. It means abandoned by people who stopped paying attention. The NS Drawer is sitting right there in the operating system, waiting for someone brave enough to use it. It doesn’t support dark mode properly. It fights against modern expectations. But it exists.
Your constraints are choices. Every “we can’t do that” in a planning meeting is a decision dressed up as a limitation. Someone decided that read receipts should inform users. Someone decided that an empty state should say “No items found.” Someone decided that all apps should look like they were designed by the same person on the same Tuesday.
You can decide differently.
The Mastodon community is the perfect home for this. Mastodon itself is the answer to “what if social media didn’t have to be the same rectangle with the same algorithmic feed?” And now it has a client that looks like it fell out of 2004 in the best possible way.
Will you use MacStodon every day? Maybe not. The tilt might wear on you. But that’s the beautiful tension at the heart of all creativity: the thing that makes something memorable is often the same thing that makes it imperfect.
Perfect software is forgettable. Weird software is worth arguing about.
So here’s my ask: build something that wouldn’t pass a design review. Use the deprecated API. Add the tilt. Ship the thing that your “taste” tells you to hide.
Because the modern software industry has become allergic to the one thing that makes tools worth using: personality. And personality — real, messy, inconvenient personality — requires breaking rules that were never actually written down.
The NS Drawer is still there. So is your urge to make something strange. Stop ignoring both.
FAQ
Q: Isn't building an app on a deprecated API just reckless?
A: Deprecated doesn't mean broken. It means unsupported. For a passion project, that's a feature, not a bug. The API works, it's just not maintained. The whole point is that 'unsupported' has become a dirty word for no good reason.
Q: What's the practical takeaway for a developer?
A: You have more freedom than you think. If a deprecated API can ship a full app, your 'technical constraints' are mostly just design-system habits wearing a suit. Try one weird thing in your next project — the worst case is you revert it, the best case is people actually talk about your work.
Q: So should all apps be quirky and hard to read?
A: No. The critique of the tilted text is valid — novelty wears off in seconds. But the answer isn't to never take risks; it's to take risks that are intentional. The moment you decide 'this is weird because I chose it,' not 'this is weird because I was lazy,' you're doing real design work.