Unsung

Minimaps are an interesting UI element because they often feel very exciting – something about things being small, or responsive, or maps just being cool? – but fail to actually be useful. I find minimaps for coding particularly tricky because, at least in my world, code all looks very much the same from far away. Seeing a thumbnailed/greeked version of it felt just like a more expensive and distracting version of a regular scrollbar, without any benefits. But Xcode does something interesting.…

Sopwith is a 1984 videogame made by David L. Clark for the original, seminal IBM PC model 5150. It sports the distinctive 4-color CGA palette and an equally distinctive PC speaker soundtrack. It’s also one of the oldest videogames still in active development, and I was surprised how enthralled I was learning about it. (First of all, you can play Sopwith in a browser. Choose “single player” and then “novice” first for the game to tell you about its unusual keyboard control scheme.) The current…

A strange thing happens when you press Enter on an empty item in a list in most text editors – the entire list item disappears: This feels counterintuitive. Isn’t Enter for committing and adding more things? Wouldn’t Backspace be the right key to press to break a list? Yes, and no. I am not sure who invented this pattern (I spotted it first in Word 95), but that someone understood a strange interaction contract existing in text editing – Enter is actually an escape hatch. In text editing, no…

An interesting 20-minute Config talk from the Instagram designer Rose McManus: It covers some of the same areas we recently talked about: diacritics and Polish S (and a fun video about English conventions from a while back), but it tackles them on a higher level. McManus talks about how people express themselves via their usernames, how that changes in various countries of the world and for what reasons, how it intersects with some UI considerations, and how people use it creatively – and also,…

Mac’s operating system has a peculiar way to install apps. An app typically arrives in a file with a .dmg extension (it stands for “device image”; my brain always reads it as “damage”), which upon double clicking becomes a kind of a drive. You go inside the drive, and there is the app icon. But the journey isn’t over. While you can run the app from the virtual drive, the drive will eventually disappear after the reboot – or if you eject it – so it’s in the app’s interest to suggest a more…

If you’re a professional web app, your key shortcut situation is not to be envied. Once the operating system grabs the ⌘ shortcuts it requires (⌘M to minimize, ⌘H to hide, ⌘Q to quit, etc.), the browser has its turn, claiming everything from ⌘R, T, N, L, W for tab operation, to ⌘F, P, O, and S for other things. And then, some input controls inside the browser also need to listen to ⌘Z and XCV, and maybe even A (select all), B (bold), and I (italic). At this point things feel barren, and some…

Speaking of computers that used to stop running if you looked at them funny, a few years ago, I wrote about the Monkey app that was there on the original Mac. Many software engineers will recognize the premise – Monkey was just a chaos script randomly pressing mouse buttons and keys during the night hours, and if the computer crashed because of Monkey’s random actions, the team would be able to reproduce it and try to fix it. I was also inspired to try a Monkey-like approach for something…

Contra the previous post, just spotted this “Same settings, new look!” callout in Firefox, on a page I have never visited before, talking about a feature I have never used: I mentioned this once – when you get someplace new, everything is new. This redesign announcement’s conditions were engineered poorly, because they didn’t even consider people who didn’t use the feature before the redesign. I keep thinking of the very old computers from the 1940s, 1950s, and even 1960s, where the challenge…

I wanted to show you a year’s worth of messages from my barber’s software, because this is what software should be. No spam, no upsells, no growth hacks, no unwelcome cuteness or puzzling verbosity. It’s so curt and straight to the point it should be set in a 1970s Helvetica: The appointment’s tomorrow. Any questions?#attention

From Robin Sloan: Yet we should never forget that the product of work isn’t only the work — it’s also the worker. Doing the work changes you; the up-close expe­ri­ence trans­forms your capa­bil­i­ties and even your desires. Insights and ideas emerge from that interface, and I believe the agent mae­stros lose a lot — too much — when they take their big step back. But I suppose this is just my temperament, which I’ve written about before. I don’t merely want things done; I want to do them.#ai…

Tangentially related to the previous post, this 8-minute video from CrowBranch is a fun tier list of various ways games try to keep you in bounds: The limits here are I believe unrelated to precision, and rather to wanting to keep the player within a controlled, designed environment. (We once covered a story of this backfiring horribly, and also talked about skyboxes and streaming.) The video also made me want to see people – especially designers with less experience slash less baggage than I…

When you learn computer science, at some point you encounter floating-point numbers in all their peculiar glory. Floating-point numbers allow you to store values that are extremely huge or extremely tiny, but that comes with a strange price. The number is still just a number with a regular limited precision, but is accompanied by a floating point – another number that just says how many zeroes to put after or in front. In effect, when your number is millions, you get a precision of thousands.…

I’ve enjoyed John Gruber’s posts about ads appearing on an increasing number of Apple surfaces: the App Store, Apple News, and – soon, perhaps – Apple Maps. (Just for reference, here’s an example of such an ad.) In a post earlier this week, Gruber likened ads to stickers on laptops, and shared a fun Steve Jobs story: That’s what those stickers on PCs are: they’re ads. Intel pays for the “Intel Inside” stickers that booger up PC laptop palm rests. Longtime readers will recall that back in August…

An interesting short story from Ernie Smith at Tedium, who ventured out to do the opposite of what we usually cover on this blog – disrespect his motor memory: Recently, I made a realization: I have been unwillingly addicted to Facebook for a long time, and it’s not even because I like Facebook. Rather, it’s because I find it an extremely easy URL to type into a modern web browser’s omnibar. This sounds crazy, but the first two letters, f and a, are on the home row, and I don’t really rely on…

Nice moment in Slack and Medium – when logging in, the login code that arrives via email is already there in the subject, in addition to hiding inside: This feels good for two reasons. One is the obvious one: you see the code earlier, it might show up in a notification, etc. But also, this should prevent multiple login codes to be threaded as a “conversation” inside your email client, since threading is based on the email subject – and threaded utility emails can be really confusing.#flow…

Over the years, I acquired this weird collection of almost-invisible, but important signifiers of when I know a product really focuses on craft and thinks about its users. I thought about one recently. Here’s what happens when you try to copy a long block of text from YouTube’s (otherwise very useful) text transcript pane: And here’s an analogous example from GitHub: GitHub’s arrives ready to go. YouTube’s throws in a lot of messy things in between the lines. Why does it matter? Because these…

Julian Fong, a software engineer at Pixar, wrote a short thread on Mastodon with an interesting take I haven’t seen before: I still don’t use any AI code in my work, but I have to review more and more of it these days. One of the things bothering me about that these days is just how lacking in personality that code is. RenderMan is a code base which is now over forty years old. It is a collection of idiosyncratic styles written by equally idiosyncratic people. I’ve been in this code base for…

In early 2023, Dan Olson at Folding Ideas made a scathing, smart, almost two-hour-long video essay about Decentraland, the metaverse that was one of the poster children of the web3 era: Most of what Decentraland does, and what it fails to do, are things that would be considered forgivable or quaint in a Kickstarter MMO that had clearly bitten off more than the creators could ever chew, but given that this is a project founded on cryptocurrency, all of those foibles are laced with the language…

A nice moment in Logic Pro, a music app. Like with most such apps, you can press R to record you playing an instrument. However, if you forgot to play record, or were just goofing around and stumbled upon something wonderful, you can press ⇧R and the recording will appear anyway, as if you had a time machine. This is a quick TikTok video showing it in action: The feature is called Flashback Capture. Of course, just like with undo send, this is no magic. The app is always recording the events…

A fun 16-minute video from PortalRunner with this premise: This is an image file, containing a picture of my cat. But if I rename it to .MP4, it becomes a video file – also of my cat. If rename to .PDF, it becomes a text document containing the script for this video. It can also be a valid webpage, a .ZIP archive, or a PowerPoint presentation, all by simply changing the name. This kind of file is sometimes called a “polyglot” (although, usually that term refers to code that works in multiple…

I got pissed at Chrome the other day. This is not the first user-hostile thing Chrome did – off the top of my head, I remember the updater fiasco from some years ago, and the more recent auto-installation of a 4GB file – but as you’ll see, this one is squarely in my wheelhouse. The transgression: Chrome took over a shortcut on my Mac – Ctrl+G – and it used it to throw me into Chrome’s version of Gemini that I have never used or was interested in using. Moreover, it decided it’s okay for Ctrl+G…

A computer science professor Paul Cantrell, on Mastodon: Creative work keeps taking roughly the same amount of human labor / attention / care, even as new technologies accelerate or remove things that used to take time. This is because creativity is fundamentally not an efficiency problem; process is not just the means of producing output, but rather a labor vessel that holds the near-invisible work that is truly important. One can feel the care that goes into creative work without being aware…

Around the time I was writing about iPhone’s Safari breaking the expected “tap to jump to the top” gesture, a conversation on social media pointed to yet another thing that this tab control does strangely. A typical use of Safari means two groups of sites: a regular set on the right, and “private” pages on the left (this is what Chrome calls “incognito mode”): As expected, you can tap on either label, and switch to the relevant group with ease: It also feels like you could slide it – and you…

A fun 19-minute video from commonLuke trying to write a short Fibonacci program in increasingly esoteric languages: Here are the languages: Python, Scratch, and assembly (as control), LOLCODE, a language resembling lolcat memes of yore, Piet, a language whose output looks like Piet Mondrian’s abstract art, Brainfuck, whose programs are made chiefly of punctuation, COW, a version of the above where each of the few instructions is a variant of “moo,” Whitespace, whos

As a teenager I adored Norton Commander, learned some UI magic from early videogames, and dreamed of a Mac my family couldn’t afford. But I think the first product that taught me something truly memorable in terms of user experience was, of all things, Excel 97. Excel 97 cooked. It was rendered in brand-new, gorgeous Tahoma, had keyboard underlines everywhere, and felt complete in terms of features. Sure, you could maybe sense the beginning of the bloat with the reorderable menus and the…

Let’s Game It Out is a YouTube channel where Josh Knoles occasionally grabs a modern videogame and tries to play it in a particularly creative way – finding bugs, breaking things, doing an action more times than anyone thought possible. What makes it even more fun is that what’s tested often are early access, unfinished games. Here’s an example 27-minute video of a game called Parking Tycoon: There are many more. I could tell you that occasionally putting one on teaches me something about bugs…

Bear (a notetaking tool) has simple image resizing, with one extra nicety – if your images are near each other, resizing one will snap to the width of the other: In the Finder, columns snap to the width necessary to keep all the names untruncated – and not one pixel more: (Sidebar: This is also the only place I’m mentioning today that nicely uses the trackpad’s haptic feedback at the snap moment. I tried to indicate it in the video; this is not the final visual treatment I’m thinking of, but…

Earlier this month, I talked about a rotation button in photos that behaved really nicely in iOS, and not so great on the Nothing Phone. Here’s a story of a similar fumble iOS once made that might bring the point home even more. The calculator app has been preinstalled on iPhones ever since their debut in 2007. For the longest time it hasn’t been anything more than a standard four-function calculator with a decades-old feature set. If you’re not careful, however, you can mess up even that. Ten…

When you visit parts of the website of the Driver & Vehicle Licensing Agency in the U.K. outside of standard office hours, you will see this: It seems ridiculous, almost like the famous 500-mile email bug, but Dafydd Vaughan explains how it came to be. It won’t be a surprise that the story starts with an old computer system, built around a day/night cadence where people would visit the agency during the day, the information would be collected, and all the data processing would happen overnight:…

Nikita Prokopov on his fun Tumblr-like site Grumpy Website that collects UI transgressions with light commentary: Why log in when you have to, when you can instead experience the same Kafkaesque maze of pages, redirects, confirmation emails, copying codes, and searching for a second device—all a week in advance? I agree with authentication experiences being absolutely horrible, especially in the corporate context. But I think the “your login expires in 5 days” callout is actually positive. Your…