Unsung

Have you head of the Swiss Cheese model? You see it sometimes in descriptions of how complex systems fail. The visual usually goes like this: The whole idea is: even if you have multiple layers of safety – like many slices of cheese – there are always holes in each slice. Typically, a hole in any slice is covered by a non-hole in the previous one or the next one. (For example, a car might not allow you to grab your keys if you have not shifted to park – or, if you start driving with a handbrake…

I am generally not someone who cares much for easter eggs (unless they come with interesting stories), but John Gruber’s one-liner made me pause: Joanna Stern explains why this emoji is correct today: 📅. (This one too: 📆) I thought this was some trickery, but the answer is simple: I did not realize inexplicably there are two distinct calendar emoji: one for calendar, and one for a tear-off calendar. The way I learned about it was to use a tool I made a few years ago called text.makeup: I…

On Mastodon, Alex Russell, a product architect who’s worked on Chrome and Edge, and has focused on tech standards for a while: Once Upon A Time At Google, a team presented results that had confounded them: making the system load several times faster increased engagement somewhat, but in line with Tammy’s findings, engagement went way up for every 100ms improvement below the 1s threshold. Going fast enough to become “dial tone” changed user behaviour and expectations in a hugely positive way for…

Thank you to everyone who answered the call for good software updates from last week. I received so many nominations that the list below is severely narrowed down, but I appreciated every response! I grouped the answers in sections I saw emerge organically, I included links to apps, and did some light editing for clarity. (You can always explore more answers on Mastodon and Bluesky.) I hope you find this inspiring in some way – I know I did! – or at least enjoyable. Something I asked for People…

In this 7-minute video, kaptainkristian talks about the fascinating process of making Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the pre-CGI hybrid animation/​live action movie from 1988: This is called “bumping the lamp” – a phrase coined by Disney during the production of Roger Rabbit to describe going above and beyond what was expected of the animators. It would’ve been perfectly feasible if Roger stayed flatly illuminated throughout this scene like a cartoon normally would, but instead the animators put in…

If you want to record the screen from your iPhone on your Mac, open the QuickTime Player app but ignore New Screen Recording, and click on New Movie Recording instead. This instruction is a fever dream of three weird things in sequence: What on earth is “QuickTime”? I am recording with a player? Why can’t I choose the option that describes exactly what I want to do? It’s interesting to me to think how we got here: QuickTime is a 1990s brand, an offshoot of QuickDraw. Instead of QuickAnimate or…

This is a design joke that always makes me laugh: This was made by… someone, a while back, I believe in response to the Twitter logo redesign of 2012, which showed the new logomark as composed of exclusively circles: Now, to be clear: that Twitter logo redesign was gorgeous, and I do not particularly care if it was designed out of circles or whatever else. I don’t even think its announcement was presented in a overly pretentious way – it was nowhere near the 2008 bloviating Pepsi redesign or…

Immich is a self-hosted photo/​video app, and one of their side pages is Cursed Knowledge: Cursed knowledge we have learned as a result of building Immich that we wish we never knew. There is something about this format that I really enjoyed as a reflection but also as a way to share with others – simple one sentence/​paragraph updates with links, so you can inhale quickly but also go deep if needed. There’s some overlap with bugs here, but it’s not necessarily only buggy stuff – also quirks of…

Over on Bluesky, Melanie Walsh asks: Favorite and least favorite file formats? I’ll start. Favorite: TXT Least favorite: HEIC The answers – both replies and quote posts – are really interesting because most of the time they’re not about inherent capabilities of each format, but: how well supported it is in the general ecosystem? how painful it was last time I used it? who’s using it and for what? if there is one app I use it with, do I like this app? (interesting in the context of PDFs which…

I’m endlessly confounded (as a user) and fascinated (as a designer) when it comes the shortcut conventions in Google’s professional web apps. They seem… bad, but bad in a strange, inexplicable, enthralling way. Previously, we encountered this: The lessons there were, primarily: don’t… do this, and also maybe don’t show it like this. Today’s entrant, from Google Drive, offers a different lesson: Immediately, I have so many questions. Why a sequenced shortcut instead of something simpler, in a…

Somewhere next to optimistic loading and optimistic saving exists another technique to make apps feel faster: optimistic committing. Flickr is a great example. After navigating to photo upload, you enter a sort of a foyer where you can drag in the photos, reorder them, name and tag them, and otherwise prepare them before pressing the big Upload button. But Flickr also optimistically assumes you will press that button, and slowly starts uploading the heavy photos in the background the moment you…

When I was at Medium, over a decade ago, I really enjoyed going deep on typography. People seemed to generally enjoy what we did. Writers really loved automatic em dashes and range dashes, discovered the beauty of hanging punctuation, and as funny as it might sound today, the smart quotes were a huge hit, too. I was proud of the tight drop caps, the underlines brought me some notoriety, and we even supported ligatures at a time when not only this wasn’t the default, but it also had some mildly…

From Jakub Krehel, a new blog post about self constraint in the era when AI makes it easy to ignore constraints altogether. My caveat is that the post doesn’t fully come together for me – jumping from AI to animations and then back to AI the way the author did does not feel cohesive. At the same time, in the middle of the post, there are some nice examples of animating juxtaposed with overanimating that caught my attention. We talked about sugar and juice before, and this adds to that…

Perhaps ironically given the subject matter, I found this 34-minute video by Razbuten a bit intense, but I would still recommend it to people who work on onboarding, settings, etc.: In the video, the author tries to answer the question: how to make any given game a challenge, given there is no universal standard of difficulty and every player arrives at a game not just with different skillset, but also likely different goals. There are many techniques a game can use to adapt to the player – a…

I like Angela Collier’s videos about physics and I was delighted to discover this 18-minute one… …because it’s a great continuation to the thread about the complexity of Microsoft Office I shared recently. Collier talks about why physicists prefer LaTeX to Word. LaTeX is sort of a nerdy HTML that predates HTML. It looks like this… …and given how nerdy HTML already is, you might imagine this is a power-user tool that’s chiefly about power and control. But Collier makes the argument that there…

My arch nemesis lives only about 1.5 blocks away from me. It’s a coffee shop door. More specifically, it’s a sign on that door: This is what happens with embarrassing regularity: I am inside, about to step out, my brain reads PUSH from the other side – and so of course, like an idiot, I push the door instead of pulling it. Sure, bad design. But don’t worry, I am not going full Don Norman on you. I wanted to show you this other thing, in Pixelmator Pro: A pretty non-threatening menu, it seems,…

I know software updates can be exhausting these days; on top of regular weariness of things changing, there’s contentious stuff like Liquid Glass, or thoughtless AI integrations. So, I’m curious: What is a recent software update, anywhere, that made you happy? Something that made an app genuinely better for you, or showed a developer listening to users, or was just plain old delightful? I’d love to learn, and I will summarize the responses next week. If you want to, you can respond on Mastodon…

John Gruber at Daring Fireball penned a short eulogy for Maestral: As of today Maestral continues to work just fine. I don’t know when these certificates are expiring. And I don’t know what I’m going to do when they do. Dropbox enshittified its app – my friend joked once that Dropbox is a rare example of a company that pivoted away from a product-market fit – and it seems Apple’s API changes didn’t really help, either. Maestral stepped in to help restore the minimalistic, functional core of…

I have never been particularly fond of “shake to undo” on the iPhone. It’s not a pleasant gesture to perform, I feel like typically I don’t have strong enough of a grip on my iPhone to invoke it without fear, and the gesture often undertriggers, requiring an even harder and more cumbersome shake, etc. etc. (One thing I never want to undo is my screen’s pristine surface by having it meet the sidewalk.) I am aware that many years ago, iOS introduced an alternative: a three-finger swipe. But I…

It’s Button Week here on Unsung, and here’s a 10-minute video by Jago Hazzard about the door opening/​closing buttons on London’s tube: We previously covered elevator buttons and the enduring myth that – at least in America – they are just “pacifiers,” disconnected from the elevator’s system. The door opening and closing buttons in London went a different, but no less complex route, having to do with changing expectations, dwell time, and air conditioning. The video also briefly covers how the…

I have to admit that when a reader wrote to me and said… Every point release of BBEdit delights me. I live in BBEdit. It’s one of the few packages for which I read through the release notes every time (they often have spots of hilarity). …I got a bit concerned. One thing that I hate more than wasted release notes (“Bug fixes and performance improvements”) is perhaps funny release notes – the ones where instead of actually conveying what changed, the text field is used for something, erm,…

A truly fascinating 17-minute video where Chris Siebert at 100th Coin ventures out to play Super Mario in a way where every single byte of code and every single byte of graphics are used, and then shows his work: There was something about seeing the visualization of the entirety of the code being “used” that made me sit up: It reminded me of IBM 1401, the 1959 business computer I saw a lot at the Computer History Museum. It takes up a big chunk of the room… …but is still so simple that you can…

(This is one of the meta posts about this very blog. If that’s not interesting to you, skip to the next one!) Here are some improvements I’ve made to Unsung in recent months. Always curious of your feedback or pointers to places that do these things better! Weekly emails. I made it so clicking on every (non-YouTube) video or image takes you to the equivalent of the weekly email you’re looking at, but on the web, where you can watch the videos in their natural habitat. It’s scrolled to the right…

From Nilay Patel, a recommendation for the best printer of 2023: Here’s the best printer in 2023: the Brother laser printer that everyone has. Stop thinking about it and just buy one. It will be fine! The Brother whatever-it-is will print return labels for online shopping, never run out of toner, and generally be a printer instead of the physical instantiation of a business model. […] I am telling you to just buy whatever Brother laser printer is on sale and never think about printers again.…

The last post about the Nothing Phone not buffering its button presses reminded me of something. Here’s IBM Selectric, a 1961 typewriter: Past decades get compressed into a singular point in time, so we might all think of Selectric as “yet another old typewriter,” and I definitely did before learning about it. But the Selectric came 80 years after the first typewriters, and it packed so much user-benefitting innovation it really was an iPhone of its time. (Alas, I don’t believe there was a…

One thing I was (and still am) worried about when it comes to my recent big interactive essay is that by showing all these classic desktop examples, the whole thing might appear old-fashioned, relevant only to a bygone era. Yet, the challenges it shows are universal. Here’s something I just spotted. This is how you rotate an image on an iPhone and on a Nothing Phone: It’s a pretty standard control – tap once to rotate counterclockwise, tap a second time to do it again, etc. – with a helpful…

I liked this page I just learned of called Incomplete List of Mistakes in the Design of CSS. It might not mean much to you if you don’t write CSS, but could be fun to check out if you do. Here are some choice quotes: border-radius should have been corner-radius. It shouldn’t be !important — that reads to engineers as “not important”. We should have picked another way to write this. white-space: nowrap should be white-space: no-wrap. It reminded me of a similar list called Known Anomalies in…

A fun (and funny!) 9-minute video from Linternet User about designing a perfect onscreen lever with the right amount of juice: Love seeing real work in progress like that, plus it ends up in a place I didn’t expect. It was also great to see “delay and snap” action elucidated so clearly. It feels like a variant of rubberbanding (or, elastic scrolling) where you intentionally disconnect an object from the cursor or finger dragging it.#above and beyond #hardware #interface design #youtube

A nice and I think effective notification preview in Retro, with a verbatim sample text of a notification right below its name: Not only you can see exactly what you’re going to get and make a much better-informed decision, but the app even uses actual names of your in-app contacts, so you can relate to the notifications more.#attention #preview

I know I’m usually driving the Finder pretty hard, but I think that’s a necessity, given its position as the center of macOS for power users, and its situation where it feels like Apple pretty much gave up on it. But I also want to show things that Finder does well, and this might be something no one does nearly as thoughtfully: text truncation. This is what happens when you have a filename that’s too long: This is really nicely done, for many reasons that work in lockstep: Finder cleverly…