Unsung

Have you ever seen this? The best way to predict the future is t̷o̶ ì̴͇n̵͓̆v̶̝̕ȇ̷̝͈̩͊̇̾̄̂̀̈̔̀͛͋͆̓͒͘͝ͅn̸̦̙̣̤͓̜̼͙̲͔̺͚̮̬͆̇̇͐̇̽̒̎t̵̮͎̃̒͒̋̂̏̒̀̿͌͗̄͑̀̀͒̈̚͠͝ ȋ̸̧̛̭̠͈̰̰̦̹̥̜̖̈̂̀̽̿̋̊́̇̍̓̆̉̄̄̊͊̒̎͋̂̒̍̽̄͝ͅt̶̨̢̺̱̻̭̣͉͕̥͚̯͍̣͕͔̬̥͔̘̼͌̉̀̄̊̆͛̽̍̐̔̐̀̾̋̆͒̏̏̋͋̽͗̌͋͗.̸̧̨̧̡̢̪͙̦͙̝̜̦̞̳̤͖̟͍̮͖̘̙̳͉̳̲̲͉̠͎̽̍̓̒̅̿͂͑̎͊̋͒̈́̅̈́̆̽̒͛͐͛̉̀̈́̈̉̏̏̋̒͘͝͝͝ In the lore of the web, this kind of a strange glitchy text is known as Zalgo: Zalgo is a meme where a popular picture/​comic is edited in a way that “corrupts” it, producing scary results.…

Nice recent addition to Gmail – a little warning if you’re replying to a thread you were BCC’ed on. Please note that I’m not necessarily endorsing the execution details, as I consider Gmail kind of a clunky operation overall. You can’t swat the message away with a swipe, the wrong quotation mark is used, and I’m perplexed about the location of this message – something tells me it was really cheap to do it this way, rather than put it close to, or even above the recipient field, to help you…

Some time ago, I shared a video talking about games that leaned into their bugs and made them part of their lore. One not listed there, perhaps because it’s the most obvious example, is Pac-Man’s kill screen. A few weekends ago at an arcade game convention, I spotted something really interesting. It was an arcade cabinet of Pac-Man, but with a twist: The game was modified and set up to start immediately at level 255, with all its challenges: fast timing, very angry ghosts, ineffective…

1. Oh damn, you caught me in the middle of something. I was just trying to make a list of Windows versions for a friend – in Google Docs, of all things. Should be easy. I already grabbed this one off of Wikipedia and massaged it a bit, but it’s still kinda ugly: I don’t love the tight padding here. Let me try something bigger, like 0.08 inches? I’ll just select the first column and punch the number in, and… What the hell!!! Jesus. What happened? Okay, let’s press ⌘Z to get out of it… Oh, no.…

I spotted this kind of a keyboard shortcut pattern the other day. Here it is in Photoshop: Here it is in DevonThink: And here in Linear: Those “ordinal” keyboard shortcuts feel nice and orderly, and look so elegant, too. But beware! The moment you’ll want to introduce a new option, or even reorder the ones you have, you’ll be in trouble: Either you preserve people’s motor memories, and then the elegant ordering immediately goes to hell – or you will have to change an existing shortcut to…

For all these times we talked about Super Mario, we never covered another important game, Doom. Here’s a 17-minute video from decino explaining how the Doom monsters move and attack the player (the “AI” in the old sense of the word): What’s really fun about this video is how it uses annotated source code (in contrast to Super Mario, the Doom source code was officially released and open sourced), and particularly how it tasks the engine with explaining itself, setting sometimes elaborate stages…

Speaking of user interface guidelines, developer Matt Sephton and others compiled many of Apple’s human interface guidelines, starting from 1980, all the way to 2014, including some goodies like early drafts, NeXT, Newton, and so on. Elsewhere, designer Geof Crowl put together his own list that goes broad instead of deep, including style guides other than Apple’s, too. The list was made in 2020 and a few links are already broken, but there are some gems here like the modern Designing for…

I like learning new things, and I like learning new old things. I was looking at Apple Human Interface Guidelines from 1987 and this passage caught my attention: The most common use of double-clicking is as a shortcut way to perform an action. For example, clicking twice on an icon is a faster way to open it than clicking once to select it, then choosing Open from the File menu; clicking twice on a word to select it is faster than dragging through it. I knew that double click an icon was a…

The Touch Bar arrived in 2016 seemingly already pre-doomed, on a generation of machines that had a “we’ve run out of ideas” smell all around them. The arrow keys were reshaped, the keyboard got a slimming down, and even the beloved MagSafe wasn’t, in fact, safe. All of these changes would prove unpopular and get reverted in time, and the axe would eventually come for the Touch Bar, too. With an enormous benefit of hindsight, a decade after its arrival, and on the (rumored) eve of fully…

Following (or, preceding) the previous post… 1. Old computers loved 8×8 fonts and they also loved 8×8 graphics. Since for many of those computers the graphics were displayed side by side without any gaps, the fonts had to waste a precious pixel or two to create some breathing room between the characters. But there was a benefit to this arrangement – you could seamlessly combine two or more tiles into something bigger. You could see that already in built-in graphics for a late 1970s computer…

A really well-produced 27-minute video from Super Splash Wave about 8-bit and 16-bit pixel art: What I liked about the video is that it doesn’t just revel in nostalgia, but goes deeper into some techniques and trends and details in the videogame graphics of the 1980s and the 1990s: palette limitations, palette animation, sizes of objects, dithering, parallax, small ventures into 3D, etc. It was also great to see specific changes and evolution of what from the distance of 2026 might seem like…

A nice moment I spotted in Asana – you can quickly record your name pronunciation: As someone who has “How to pronounce my name” in the footer of his website, it’s much appreciated! The result appears as a simple icon next to your name: For discoverability, if you spot this speaker icon on someone else’s profile yet, it shouldn’t be that hard to connect it to the microphone on your own profile that allows you to record: #details

Safari broke tap to top for tabs (say it three times fast), and Bear added two-fingers gestures. Ivory – a Mastodon client for iOS – tries a different approach in a slightly different setting. The normal tap to top gesture works as expected, but tapping the top again returns you back where you were before: I believe this is meant to be a small gesture of help if you tap to top accidentally, yet I am not entirely sure it’s effective. Would you, in a moment of panic, decide to do the same thing…

I praised the note-taking app Bear before for its memory; the app would always remember your last-visited note and the precise place within it, even if it had every right to forget it. But there is a general problem here: memory that kicks in when not expected can be frustrating, as you have to undo its results and “reset to normal.” For Bear that’s not a problem, though, right? The whole iOS has a nice “tap near the top to scroll to the top” gesture that would work here as well, making it easy…

I just learned something fun this weekend. The seminal videogame Pong from 1972 looked like this: But there was a problem. Here’s Al Alcorn, the designer/​engineer of the machine: The paddles on the original Pong didn’t go all the way to the top. There was a defect in the [circuit] – I used a very simple circuit, I had to, to make the paddles, but they didn’t go to the top. This meant that there could be situation where the ball sneaks up past the paddle at the very top of the screen, and the…

The task manager app Linear does something interesting I have not seen before. In the keyboard shortcut tooltips, it highlights the modifier keys you already pressed, to give you confirmation you’re on the right track: I think this is nice, particularly given that the modifier key situation is kind of a mess, and particularly if you consider some keyboards present their modifier keys like this: I think it’s valuable to offer a connection between your fingers touching keys and something…

Something different for today: a one-hour episode of a podcast A Life Well Wasted from 2025. (I can’t link to it directly, but it’s the most recent episode, called “Game Over.”) It’s a human story whose beats might be familiar to some of you: a long software project that ultimately failed despite the enormous effort. And it did so in an industry – high-budget videogames – where failures might feel particularly brutal: the projects take multiple years but the defeat can be swift, the servers get…

I am generally not a fan of typewritten art, because at some point it all starts to feel a bit same’y, and the gimmick of using a typewriter as a paintbrush wears off pretty quickly. But these drawings by German artist Arno Beck caught my attention, because it feels like they playfully remix three eras: overtyping keyboard art (early 1900s), the sort of photorealistic smooth shading I most associate with ASCII/​ANSI art (1990s), big pixels from early home videogames (1980s). In c

Robin Sloan: I still use Sublime Text for all of my programming and all of my newsletter-ing. […] The app is simple and superfast; I have it set up exactly the way I like it […], and it’s difficult for me to imagine ever switching to anything else. Here is a piece of software as sturdy and obedient as a cast-iron pan. Sloan links to a piece by David Bushnell about Sublime Text, who writes: I don’t know who develops it and I don’t care. All I know is that I can place my text cursor and read the…

iPhone’s home button and then the swipe up home gesture are so important and well done that they probably need to be covered as Unsung Heroes, but I wanted to mention something else today as we’re revisiting the whole “app icons in squircles” story (my most recent post + Louie Mantia’s post). The first iPhone in 2007 put apps as squircles on the home screen, and it also put a matching shape on the home button: The shape on the button didn’t survive very long. It was removed starting with iPhone…

Some years ago, the inimitable channel Technology Collections posted a 17-minute video about the peculiar design quirk of ceiling and room fans – they usually order their options Off → High → Medium → Low rather than the more natural Off → Low → Medium → High. The video is a bit off topic for this channel, but check it out if you’re interested how sometimes weird physics considerations influence design in the real world: In the video, the host also talks about the more natural order that…

The post about the dark mode toggle reminded me of two similar things rattling in my brain. On the positive side, here’s a delightful interaction from macOS. I can easily maximize the window to take up half the screen, but the moment I start dragging it, it recalls and nicely restores itself to its original size: macOS designers correctly figured out that the window being maximized or half-maximized is a state – but it has to be a state dressed up as a size. The button entry point is the…

On her blog, Lea Verou makes a case that each user-facing website dark-mode toggle should only ever show two options, but in a smart way. The challenge is that any dark mode toggle needs to actually accommodate three options: dark, light, and the default “whatever the system says” (which can be always dark, always light, or change with the time of day). Many toggles simply pass that complexity onto the user: I want to get something out of the way: I don’t think Verou’s article as an article is…

From Marton Barcza at TechAltar, a good 12-minute video analyzing what went wrong with the famed Live Tiles that Microsoft was pushing throughout most of the 2010s: Now, among Windows Phone fans the pervasive opinion is that Live Tiles have failed because Microsoft did a poor job with them, which I think is at least partially true – after all, even many key Microsoft apps like Skype had broken Live Tiles half the time, the Windows 10 start menu was filled by Microsoft with Live Tiles that were…

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…