mouthtype
VISUAL AUDIT · MAIN @ 8D70284 · V0.1.0-RC.1 · 18 OCT 2026
Each row starts with the current element rebuilt from the Swift and design sources (CURRENT), followed by alternatives 1a through 1y. Pixel art stays pixel art. Where macOS 26 glass is proposed, the material is a CSS stand-in for NSGlassEffectView. Locked: 1d (menu bar glyph), 1j (pill size), 1e/1f/1g pill styles, 1k/1l/1m cards per style, 1p icon, 1q+1s Settings, 1t setup. Website open. Spec in DECISIONS.md.
Four template glyphs at 16×15 pt, 1× and 2× from the same art. Idle is outlined, recording solid, processing swaps the smile for three dots, unavailable is a flat mouth struck through. The system handles the colour (template image), so every concept below is ink-only and is shown on the light and dark bars.
Outlined lips at rest; while recording the glyph becomes an ear with a solid canal, so “listening” is literal. The shape swap is the biggest state change of the three concepts, which is good for a glance at the bar. Risk: an ear at 16 px is the hardest pictogram here, and the swap means two silhouettes to learn.
The 16 px icon sprite (LIPS16) rebuilt as a 16×15 template: solid lips, open mouth, I-beam inside. Recording opens the mouth wider and replaces the caret with four live level bars (the same bars as the Classic pill). Processing: three dots in the mouth. Unavailable: lips closed, struck through. One silhouette for every state, and the icon in the Dock and the glyph in the bar finally match.
The plainest read of the name: a closed mouth that opens while you talk. No lip detail, so it survives 1× and the dimmed “tinted” bar in macOS 26. The three frames give the bar a heartbeat without a second shape. Least tied to the app icon of the three.
Requested mix: the solid caret-lips silhouette from 1b, with the caret removed. The mouth is closed at rest, opens with your voice while recording (three frames driven by the pill’s smoothed level), shows three dots while processing, and is struck through when unavailable. Still the app icon’s shape, now with something to say.
macOS lays everything out in points, not pixels. The glyph is 16×15 pt, the Classic pill 28 pt tall, the Hi-Fi pill 146×32 pt (Standard) or 292×64 pt (Large 2×) on every Mac. A Retina display just spends 2 device pixels per point, which is why the @2x art is the same drawing doubled. What does change is how much of the screen those points occupy.
28 pt capsule, #1A1A1A at 96%, 1 pt #4D4A42 rim, ten #FFFFEB bars at 4.25 pt pitch, 18 pt controls. It is well built (pixel-snapped bars, critically damped width springs, Reduce Motion paths). It is also opaque and always dark, which on macOS 26 reads as a holdover. The board spec already explored the fixes; the three alts below pick them up. Locked: all three ship as pill styles alongside Classic and Hi-Fi (Glass, Matrix, Minimal), chosen in Appearance → Pill style.
Same geometry, same bars, same controls; the body becomes the system glass material (clear over light content, smoked over dark) and the rim becomes the specular edge. Smallest change, largest “belongs on macOS 26” gain. Stop stays solid so the primary action never washes out. Text falls back to a solid body when the wallpaper is busy (the spec’s “glass only as an opaque window” caveat).
Straight from spec.md’s recommendation: a continuous-corner squircle (no longer “every other dictation pill”), 13×7 amber dot matrix with ghost dots, breathing REC lamp, M:SS only when locked, squircle controls at the 20 pt minimum. The padlock becomes the 9 px lips sprite, tying the pill to the icon. Light mode uses the pager LCD window (see 1g for the light body).
The spec’s “work-machine” option: same silhouette, grid, controls and motion as 1f, the dots swapped for ten plain bars and system text. Its real contribution to the audit is the light body: today the pill is dark on every desktop; this one follows the appearance setting, which is what a 2026 Mac user expects from anything floating on their wallpaper.
146×32 art pixels, nearest-neighbour at an integer scale, amber VFD with three segment tiers, 3×5 and 5×7 bitmap faces. Glass does not apply to a deliberately retro object, so these alts leave the chassis alone and work on where it sits, what colour its readout is, and how big it is on which screen.
The chassis is a physical object; glass is the shelf it sits on. An 8 pt squircle tray in the system material gives it a contact shadow and a Tahoe edge without touching a single art pixel, and gives the delivery card (1k) the same material to share. The shelf hides when the pill is a bare dot.
layout.json already separates segment tiers, text and error colours from the chassis, so a readout colour setting is cheap: amber (default), the spec’s cool white (#E8F1FF, glow #78AEFC) and red (#FF3D32). It is the one Hi-Fi personalisation that costs no new art and matches the “Clean by default. Personal by choice.” line in Appearance.
Answers the “giant or tiny” worry directly. Classic gets a Large too (a 2× geometry: 56 pt tall, 4.5 pt bar width, 36 pt controls, 28 pt message face), Hi-Fi keeps integer art scaling. Automatic resolves per screen at show time using the pointer’s screen, which PillPlacement already looks up.
224 pt face, continuous 16 pt corners, 11/12/12 insets, 6 pt status dot with glow, Instrument Serif 15 header, Instrument Sans 13 transcript (five lines, then scrolls), 26 pt pill buttons, a 3 pt countdown bar along the bottom. Always dark, always the Classic colours, even over the Hi-Fi pill. Locked: the card follows the pill style. Glass → 1k, Matrix → 1l, Minimal → 1m (light) / 1l dark body, Classic → today’s card, Hi-Fi → 1l with the VFD strip.
Send the mockups to Sean before Friday and copy the design channel.
Same CardLayout numbers, glass body, 24 pt dismiss (the pill’s own minimum), and two copy fixes: the pill under a card says the detail (“Your text is safe”) instead of repeating the header, and question cards get the amber accent so the dot is visible. Pairs with 1e or the 1h shelf.
Instead of a second panel 8 pt above the pill, the pill (1f geometry) grows upward into the card: one squircle, one shadow, one material. The readout row stays at the bottom and keeps saying the short thing (SAFE, the Undo clock), so there is no duplicated message. Dismissing shrinks it back to a pill. Costs a new panel-sizing path in PillController.
Send the mockups to Sean before Friday and copy the design channel.
The card today is the only dark object on a light desktop. This is the spec’s light body (#FBFBFC → #E6E6EA, 0.5 pt hairline) with the same layout, ink #1D1D1F, error red #D70015, and the website’s action green for “good news” cards instead of the invisible quiet-ink dot. Pairs with the 1g pill; the dark side is what ships today.
Red pixel lips, parted, a cream I-beam in the dark opening, on a dithered orange tile with a baked pixel drop shadow. macOS 26 masks every icon to its own squircle, lights it with its own glass and offers Dark, Clear and Tinted renderings; a baked shadow and hand-drawn corners get clipped or doubled. The lips can stay exactly as drawn. Locked: 1p. Lips at 78% of the tile, light dither kept, baked shadow and pixel corners dropped; 32 and 16 redrawn on the grid.
The same three lips sprites (36×22, 21×17, 9×9), scaled by whole numbers, on a flat #F19A4B tile that fills the system mask. The dither and the shadow go; the system supplies depth. Loses the hand-made texture but survives every Dock treatment unchanged.
What Icon Composer wants: tile, lips and cursor as separate layers so the system can relight them. Default keeps the warm tile; Dark puts the red lips on charcoal with a faint orange glow; Clear and Tinted use the one-colour lips (cursor knocked out) over the system material. The pixel grid is preserved in every mode.
Today the lips occupy about 56% of the tile; Apple’s own icons put the mark at 65–80%. Scaling the lips up (and keeping a light dither as texture, not shadow) makes the mouth legible in a Dock full of glass tiles and in the 32 pt Settings sidebar mark. The 32 and 16 sprites are redrawn on the grid above (drop-in replacements for LIPS32 / LIPS16 in sprites.py).
192 pt sidebar with the mark and a 27 pt serif wordmark, four list pages, two sidebar shortcuts, a mono footer. Content: 34 pt padding, mono eyebrow, 38 pt serif title, 13 pt Instrument Sans rows separated by Dividers with 17 pt vertical padding. The voice is right; the row chrome is bespoke where macOS 26 now has a strong default (grouped forms), and the window is wider than it needs to be. Locked: 1q structure, 1s for Dark and the Appearance page.
Every string from today’s General page, regrouped into four macOS 26 inset groups (Input, Cleanup, While recording, Mac) with the system’s 40 pt rows and inset hairlines. The sidebar becomes the Tahoe glass sidebar with traffic lights inside it, the accent is the brand green (#315B54) rather than system blue, and the serif title drops to a 22 pt header bar so the whole page fits in 900×620 with no scroll. “Launch at login” and “Set Up Mouthtype…” become a toggle and a sidebar entry respectively.
Shown at 0.73 scale. The smallest honest Settings for a menu bar utility: toolbar tabs, one column, grouped rows, descriptions moved to help text. Spellings and Phrases become tabs instead of sidebar buttons. Loses the editorial sidebar and the headline eyebrows, which is the trade.
Shown at 0.73 scale. The Appearance page under 1q’s structure in Dark: the pill preview is a live PillSkinView over a wallpaper swatch (not a rendered PNG), the skin picker gains Matrix and Minimal from 03, and the two new settings from 04 (size, readout colour) sit in the same group. Accent tints shift to the lighter brand green for contrast on dark.
Mono header (MOUTHTYPE / GET STARTED · STEP 1 OF 4), a 68 pt tinted symbol tile, 42 pt serif title, secondary detail, one prominent button tinted #315C56, footer with Refresh status / Set up later and a reopen hint. Calm and well-written. The step counter is the only sense of progress, and the symbol tile is the only place the brand green appears. Locked: 1t.
A sheet-sized glass window sized to its content, four step dots instead of a counter, the lips sprite instead of a generic SF symbol, and no Refresh button: status is polled when the window is key (it already is: windowDidBecomeKey calls refresh). The footer names all four steps so the ending is visible from the start.
Progress is spatial: the rail shows all four steps, ticks them off, and lets you jump back. Content aligns left in a fixed-height window so the layout stops floating. Live status replaces the Refresh button. Closest to the Settings sidebar structure (and 1q), so setup and settings feel like one app.
Permissions resolve in any order and out of band (System Settings, a download), so a checklist matches reality better than a wizard. Each row shows its live state and its one action; the model download runs while you grant the rest. Fastest path to the first dictation, least ceremony.
Paper white, ink #111827, a 1 px rule under a 110 pt masthead, serif at 99 px, mono eyebrows at 9 px, the action green button. The right half is an illustration: a tilted paper with speaking vs typing pace and the pill PNG on top. It explains dictation; it doesn’t show Mouthtype on a Mac.
mouthtype
Why MouthtypeCompareDocsGet started ↗
SOFTWARE FOR SAYING THINGS
Hold a key. Say your thing. Get back to it.
Mouthtype turns your voice into text, right on your Mac.
Source code (GPL-3.0) ↗ · Linux test client
RELEASE CANDIDATE · macOS 26+ · APPLE SILICON
Same copy, same left column with the sub-10 px mono lifted to 10 px. The right half becomes a wallpaper crop with a menu bar wearing the 1d glyph, a Notes-like window receiving the dictation at the caret, and the real pill (1f) at the bottom. The skin radio switches this whole stage (Classic, Matrix, Hi-Fi), so the illustration is the product.
mouthtype
Why MouthtypeCompareDocsGet started ↗
SOFTWARE FOR SAYING THINGS
Hold a key. Say your thing. Get back to it. Mouthtype turns your voice into text, right on your Mac.
Lets the headline do the work at 118 px, then turns the skin picker into the illustration: three live pills on three desk swatches, in the site’s existing bordered-panel language (the same box the cleanup example uses further down). Drops the paper and dot grid. “Hold Fn to try it” works for visitors who already have the app; for everyone else the pills animate on hover.
mouthtype
Why MouthtypeCompareDocsGet started ↗
SOFTWARE FOR SAYING THINGS
Hold a key. Say your thing. Get back to it.
Mouthtype turns your voice into text, right on your Mac.
Source code (GPL-3.0) ↗ · Linux test client
RELEASE CANDIDATE · macOS 26+ · APPLE SILICON
Ink and paper swapped: #111318 ground, #F4F3E8 type, the Hi-Fi’s amber as the single accent (eyebrow, the italic “source.”, the button). The Hi-Fi pill finally gets to be the hero object at 2×, on a dark desk where its VFD glows. Keeps every string. The biggest departure from the current site, so it is the one to A/B rather than ship by default.
