Unsung

Speaking of breaking search, an absolutely horrendous design decision I just spotted when using Bing Search: Yep, you saw this correctly: as you scroll, the ads (already pretty much masquerading as regular search results) actually get bigger to grab your attention. Jesus. I don’t know why I was reminded of this fav Twitter joke: On a more serious note, I was also reminded of this.#enshittification

Thirteen years ago today, Google killed Google Reader. In 2023, The Verge wrote a great piece about the shutdown: Google’s feed-reading tool offered a powerful way to curate and read the internet and was beloved by its users. Reader launched in 2005, right as the blogging era went mainstream; it made a suddenly huge and sprawling web feel small and accessible and helped a generation of news obsessives and super-commenters feel like they weren’t missing anything. It wasn’t Google’s most popular…

If you stepped into the dwarven capital of Ironforge on September 13, 2005, you would find only bones. Lots of bones. The city, along with every other major population center in World of Warcraft, had been ravaged by a plague that slaughtered players by the thousands, their bleached bones covering every street. This is the beginning of the retelling of one of the most infamous bugs in videogame history, written by Steven Messner in 2019. It’s a surprisingly thrilling read. The TL; DR of the…

In 2023, Neal Agarwal created The Password Game, a viral browser-based game. Wikipedia has a nice summary: Although the initial requirements include setting a minimum of characters or including numbers, uppercase letters, or special characters, the rules gradually become more unusual and complex. These can involve managing having Roman numerals in the string to multiply, adding the name of a country that players have to guess from random Google Street View imagery (as a reference to GeoGuessr),…

In my three decades online, it has never occurred for me to try this, and I found it so delightful once I did – both Chrome and Firefox will quietly rewrite backslashes in URLs into slashes: Not Safari, however, even though the URL living standard says it should. I am very curious if the presence of backslashes in URLs is owing to Windows still showing backslashes in file paths, or just because people casually don’t see any difference between / and \, which are arguably both similar, and…

Even before the “remaster,” my essay about the Polish S bug was routinely discovered by Hacker News and other places, so I thought I would take a look at all the commentary over the years and summarize. First, pragmatically, these are the lessons for any keyboard shortcut designer: On Windows, AltGr (Right Alt) and Ctrl+Alt shortcuts are one and the same, and Right Alt and alphabetic keys are used for some languages to output regular accented letters. You should not prioritize Ctrl+Alt…

I praised ⌘⇥ recently in my essay for cleverly not showing itself when you press the keys really fast. Here’s another nice detail. If you press and hold ⌘⇥, you will eventually stop at the end. (You can then press ⌘⇧⇥ or ⌘` to go in the other direction.) However, if you are already at the end, pressing ⌘⇥ again wraps around to the beginning: The issue of whether to wrap around or not is more universal; you can see it in many lists, ⌘F, and so on. On one hand, it’s nice to have a solid…

For decades now, Raymond Chen has been posting to his blog The Old New Thing about various technical Microsoft quirks, occasionally venturing into Unsung territory. Last week, Chen shared a nice remembrance of Tony Krueger, a person responsible for implementing the red squiggly underlines in Word: Tony worked on Word 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, then on Word for OS/2 and Word for Mac, then returned to Word 6.0 and several versions beyond that. He probably holds the record for “most versions of Word shipped.”…

Apple might have undone the macOS Tahoe menu icons decision, but this wasn’t the only contentious iconography issue in their ecosystem. On his blog, Jim Nielsen writes how Apple filed away so much expression by forcing rigid icon bureaucracy in macOS. Nielsen focuses mostly on distinctiveness; previously, you could make the icon unique by its general shape or the shape of its contents, but one of these two levers has now been taken away: This over-emphasis on “systems” design seems endemic to…

Speaking of remastering (and diacritics), I grabbed my older Medium deep dive called The curious case of the disappearing Polish S, and put it on the new site. It looks so much better than on Medium and while I was at it, I’ve redone all the visuals, and updated it a little bit.) It’s still probably one of my favourite bugs to encounter. I hope you enjoy!#bug deep dives #keyboard #localization #marcin wichary #popular #text editing