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Unsung

unsung.aresluna.org

A blog about software craft and quality

Software / engineering practiceApple / classic MacComputing history

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602 from 1 Jun 2014 to 30 Oct 2026
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about daily (596 in the last year)
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2026 557

  1. “That’s how birds fly in my nightmares from now on.”
  2. “Once you get yourself into this situation, it’s hard to get out.”
  3. For love (of typography)
  4. “After many years of faithful service, the magic switch now sits in disgrace on a counter somewhere.”
  5. “Players are still trying to find the alternate reality that might be hidden underneath.”
  6. “All these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided.”
  7. “A lot of internet man-hours have gone into figuring out what, or who, is behind them.”
  8. “R.I.P. Zeus 2020–2020”
  9. November 22, 1963
  10. A set of rectangles getting exponentially angrier, too
  11. “Dear Human”
  12. Book review: The Cuckoo’s Egg
  13. “Miss you, Tom.”
  14. “I found an innocent loop that had no test in it.”
  15. The Swiss Cheese model, pt. 4: The iPhone jump scare
  16. “For the first several seconds, there would have been little to suggest that anything was wrong.”
  17. My first visit to New York Cities
  18. “You hold down Control, Shift, Alt, and click Technical Support. And boom.”
  19. “If you’re still using Popcorn Time, we think it’s time to move on.”
  20. “Scaring the daylights out of unsuspecting users”
  21. “As user-friendly as a cactus”
  22. Mailbag: October 2026
  23. Rough and smooth around the edges
  24. Before pixels: Speed-Minder
  25. “No results” doesn’t mean “no results,” pt. 1
  26. “Because most users do not use dates before March 1, 1900, this problem is rare.”
  27. “We find many users write to us in a spirit of collaboration.”
  28. Obsessive about obfuscation
  29. Motor, motor memory
  30. “We all hope you have a great week, even if you never buy a Playdate.”
  31. “Hindered by its headline feature”
  32. “In every study that considered the question”
  33. “Traditional, but puzzling”
  34. “No standard format for writing data to these tapes”
  35. “Is clip art actually dead?”
  36. The distance between ⌘8 and ⌘9
  37. “Both of these games have had their heydays and then both went astray a bit.”
  38. “They take time. Put in the time.”
  39. “I’m ready to throw up at any moment.”
  40. The beautiful, quiet power of motor memory
  41. “A platform that for 30 years was considered unreachable”
  42. “They take one look at the UI and abandon it.”
  43. Subtitles on demand
  44. Deeper dive: Keyboard differences between Windows and Macs
  45. Playdate’s update interface takes charge
  46. “Konami looked at its restrictions and designed an entire level based around it.”
  47. Safari and system design, pt. 3
  48. Limitations of magic
  49. GUIdebook and other GUI stories
  50. “I don’t know why this is so hard.”
  51. “Yeah… I was very tired that night.”
  52. “But it would have bothered us the rest of our lives.”
  53. “I mean, nobody should buy this device right now.”
  54. “I was just searching for a bookshelf.”
  55. “Signs I would see on metal doors and transformer boxes”
  56. “Have conviction in what you want to share with the world.”
  57. The left hand should know what the right hand is doing
  58. A hacker’s guide to bending the universe
  59. Before pixels: Modular industrial dashboards
  60. Book review: What Can A Body Do?
  61. Arc’s good keyboard shortcuts
  62. A loading state within a loading state
  63. “I’m especially proud of the 1e+9 duration.”
  64. “First, don’t interfere with user input.”
  65. “But it looks like a lot less work than we had to do.”
  66. “I didn’t know about this shortcut until recently.”
  67. “Hey, this isn’t your father’s 737.”
  68. “Apple has developed an unexpected workaround.”
  69. “I want to release it, even if the quality would be a little lower.”
  70. Interesting web design moments
  71. “This also introduces new questions.”
  72. YNAB’s pocket change
  73. Who undoes the undoers
  74. “I love it because it’s a bit messy, and not everything lines up perfectly.”
  75. CleanShot’s bulldozed settings
  76. Key symbols we lost to time, pt. 2: The Mac side
  77. My design bookshelves
  78. an interactive representation of my design bookshelves
  79. “Insert your favorite nursery rhyme.”
  80. “59.94Hz is standard on televisions in North America.”
  81. Not everything needs to be a round rect
  82. “But, as we all know, the individual light bulbs are not moving.”
  83. “Tuned to the particular typing mistakes to which Teitelman was prone”
  84. AI policy
  85. “Redesigned callouts to be less visually chaotic.”
  86. “Act now, apologize later”
  87. Nova’s menu wayfinding
  88. “Sweet, a whole website of video game menus”
  89. Key symbols we lost to time, pt. 1: The PC side
  90. Fingers don’t look around
  91. “A great look at the destructive power of an uncaught Infinity value”
  92. Anthony Hobday’s design references
  93. DaisyDisk’s onboarding
  94. Unsung Heroes: Super Sprint
  95. “…and at that point it stops being a system.”
  96. Ivory’s account switching
  97. Responsive text and code
  98. Don’t show again (Taylor’s version)
  99. Got your back, pt. 8
  100. Unsung @ 500: Behind the scenes
  101. Unsung @ 500: Nine design details
  102. Unsung @ 500: The new design
  103. “I would be very happy to see all kinds of text editors adopt this.”
  104. Windows does it better, pt. 3: Cut in File Explorer
  105. “A tricky problem I had to be thoughtful about.”
  106. The secrets of your menus
  107. The Swiss Cheese model, pt. 3
  108. “You can always click on the mirror icon to turn it into… a mirror.”
  109. “This was not the first time the European Commission had attempted to correct for the permissions pollution.”
  110. “I just chose words carefully.”
  111. “We want it to really confuse people, but also really make people happy.”
  112. “An absolute bare minimum of interactivity”
  113. “They had no concept of a duty of care to their users.”
  114. “This time, there had to be a different ending.”
  115. Medium’s writerly favicons
  116. Let me walk around
  117. Two previews for the price of one
  118. Mark MacKay’s explainers
  119. “This way, the interface does not get in the way.”
  120. “This would result in some serious street cred and respect.”
  121. Testing tip: Make your keyboard fast
  122. “A quick internet search should provide you with step-by-step instructions.”
  123. YouTube’s right click relay
  124. Movie review: General Magic
  125. Zalgo: The good, the bad, and the very, very ugly
  126. Got your back, pt. 7
  127. “The ghosts are fast and they don’t turn blue.”
  128. The Swiss Cheese model, pt. 2
  129. The item vs. the position
  130. “Behind their simplistic behavior is a fairly elegant system.”
  131. “I think there’s a lot of value in these.”
  132. “If nothing happened, you probably did not press the button quickly enough the second time.”
  133. Deeper dive: Were Touch Bar’s problems software rather than hardware?
  134. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often tiles
  135. “What actually happened was the birth of a genre in digital graphics.”
  136. Name pronunciation in Asana
  137. Tap to top: Ivory
  138. Tap to top: Bear
  139. A bug becoming a feature (1972 edition)
  140. Linear’s visual key feedback
  141. “If you aim for the king, you better not show up eight years late.”
  142. Arno Beck’s art
  143. “I want to code; I’m not looking to make lifestyle choices.”
  144. iPod’s circular apps
  145. The first notch is magical
  146. Seeing like a state
  147. “Solving a largely imaginary user goal”
  148. “Microsoft’s most ambitious attempt to reinvent the start screen”
  149. Xcode’s clever minimap
  150. “It’s unclear how Sopwith escaped to the general public.”
  151. When commit means cancel
  152. “Some guy named Paul”
  153. “As a Windows user, it’s a very surreal way to install a program.”
  154. Asana’s fascinating Tab shortcuts
  155. The monkey lives again
  156. You only get one chance to make a zeroth impression
  157. One and one thing only
  158. “Insights and ideas emerge from that interface.”
  159. “Next up? You know it. You hate it. It’s the invisible wall.”
  160. “This is a sphere getting exponentially angrier as time passes.”
  161. “Gravity is worth asking about.”
  162. “Rather than fighting my tendency to type these two characters in my omnibar, I neutralized it.”
  163. What it says on the tin
  164. In between the lines
  165. “Every now and then some Unicode hyphen character makes its way into comments.”
  166. Meta on meta and Meta
  167. A time machine in Logic Pro
  168. “A vicious circle of incompatibility”
  169. Chrome’s breaking and entering
  170. “Creativity is fundamentally not an efficiency problem.”
  171. Safari and system design, pt. 2
  172. “Jokes, art projects, or cruel and unusual punishment”
  173. Unsung Heroes: Repeat in Excel 97
  174. “Something seems to be going crucially wrong with the frame rate.”
  175. Five moments in snapping history
  176. “Try quickly typing 1+2+3. I bet you won’t get 6.”
  177. “Is this acceptable? Not really. Is it understandable? Absolutely.”
  178. “Maze of pages, redirects, and confirmation emails”
  179. The Swiss Cheese model, pt. 1
  180. text.makeup
  181. “No such thing as too fast”
  182. A good kind of an update: The responses
  183. “It would’ve been much simpler to just use an animated cigar.”
  184. Max one weird thing
  185. Sets of overlapping circles
  186. “Cursed knowledge we have learned that we wish we never knew.”
  187. “If HEIC has no haters I’m dead.”
  188. More absolutely strange Google shortcuts
  189. Flickr’s optimistic committing
  190. My one (1) Medium secret
  191. “Animating something and animating something well are two very different things.”
  192. “Not being good at something doesn’t mean you can’t love it.”
  193. “…or I could click seventy buttons.”
  194. The adjective of the present or the verb of the future
  195. A good kind of an update?
  196. “Nothing at all like the bloated app that Dropbox’s Mac client has grown into”
  197. An accident inside an accident
  198. “Relying on passengers to open the doors proved to be a bit of a curse.”
  199. The great release notes of BBEdit
  200. “If you never saw the words Game Over, did you really do it all?”
  201. About Unsung: Recent improvements
  202. “You are a printer we are all printers”
  203. Balls (practically) to the wall
  204. If you’re a button, you have one job
  205. “The root of all margin-collapsing evil”
  206. “I know you think I’ve lost my mind, but trust me.”
  207. A simple notification preview in Retro
  208. Finder’s elite eliding
  209. Make the logo^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hsomething bigger
  210. “That’s a big number – by almost any scale other than Google’s.”
  211. “No one knows who patient zero was.”
  212. “The evilest will-breaking browser game to exist.”
  213. “Invalid-reverse-solidus validation error”
  214. Mailbag: The curious case of the disappearing Polish S
  215. ¿Por qué no los dos? pt. 1
  216. “Felt a bit like sorcery.”
  217. “Icons that are iconic”
  218. The curious case of the disappearing Polish S
  219. Noise as information and information as noise
  220. Frozen in time
  221. I was wrong about Duff’s device
  222. “If you can’t stand by a feature, you shouldn’t launch it.”
  223. “It’s like a Freudian slip simulator.”
  224. Good renewal comms from Panic
  225. The MacCharlie Method
  226. Fingers already on the keyboard
  227. “Ketchup is next, which is similar in construction to the mustard.”
  228. “Playing through it felt like reading a love letter.”
  229. “Something that probably bothered us more than anyone.”
  230. Windows does it better, pt. 2
  231. “That knowledge slides away.”
  232. “It’s about squeezing more out of everything.”
  233. “Don’t entangle emulators in infringement events that are visible from space.”
  234. “It’s rare that printing nothing at all is the best default behavior.”
  235. Paste And Match Style is not the answer
  236. Show your hands honor for the strange power they bring you
  237. “I kept getting trophies and was wondering how that was possible in a demo.”
  238. Clicking, fast and slow
  239. I can’t stop watching Bret Victor’s talks
  240. Fontificator
  241. Panic’s blog respects its own history
  242. “The little details he’d missed became obvious.”
  243. “They had the simplest task in the world.”
  244. Not slow and not steady
  245. “Big, fast, careless swipes”
  246. “Update announcements are most likely to appear at the least convenient time.”
  247. “Must hate yourself to submit”
  248. “This is my favorite news from all of WWDC this week.”
  249. The trouble with font previews
  250. Got your back, pt. 6
  251. “Imagine being a pixel on an old Pac-Man game.”
  252. “I’ve lost entire sentences of text to this incompetent implementation.”
  253. “I am skeptical it achieves what Apple intends.”
  254. “Each one of these buttons has four distinct purposes.”
  255. Book review: Steve Jobs in Exile
  256. “Artifacts from a strange moment”
  257. Face with symbols over mouth, apparently
  258. “-4.5° rather than -45°?”
  259. More molly guards
  260. “Then suddenly we were boring, bloated, and not particularly interesting.”
  261. Good type against all odds
  262. Three good interactive explainers
  263. A mixed blessing
  264. “Whoever is doing this had some fun with adding these portions.”
  265. Writing about fonts
  266. See you on the other side
  267. “In a world of unresponsive 911 calls, it is the 912 that actually works.”
  268. “Nemo? That’s a nice name.”
  269. “The broken, slapdash, bed-shitting end to one of the most iconic franchises in all of gaming history”
  270. Shift & ⌥ & Splat & ⎋ Escape
  271. The surprising richness of GarageBand
  272. “The pipeline of future experts is thinning from both ends.”
  273. “It took months to find appliances that didn’t need apps to function.”
  274. Day for night
  275. “But obviously, that’s just silly stuff.”
  276. Within or without
  277. A few interesting modern pixel fonts
  278. Google Docs shortcut onboarding
  279. FAIL_MAIL_OVER_500_MILES=TRUE
  280. “Why pay for an orchestra when your computer can do it all?”
  281. Deeper dive: Lisa’s copy (and cut, and paste)
  282. “This is a common tell in web apps, and we did a lot of work to eliminate it.”
  283. Chrome’s abnormal tab search
  284. “Some say it sounds like an alto saxophone.”
  285. Shallow breathing
  286. “If you just ignore those pesky impossible details, the demo looks deceptively simple.”
  287. “Accents are an opportunity, not a burden.”
  288. Less doesn’t need more
  289. “Easy to use,” the hard parts
  290. “We accepted this gradual bloat, but that’s not progress.”
  291. Safari and system design, pt. 1
  292. “193 hours of attempts (and practice)”
  293. Not a radio pharma ad
  294. “Cryptic mode was born from a hard constraint.”
  295. Speaking of wiggling the mouse
  296. “This is where your mouse becomes a cryptographic instrument.”
  297. Mailbag: Photoshop’s focus post
  298. Rug pulled
  299. Save For Web claws
  300. “Nothing short of a magic trick”
  301. “They did the bare minimum and moved on.”
  302. A preview of the future
  303. Peaked in 2015
  304. “There seems to be a file that is just filled with undecipherable Morse.”
  305. “This was a user-friendly computer.”
  306. “Watchmaker’s delicate precision and ornate mechanical intent”
  307. “Traditionally, fonts were just shapes.”
  308. “Who thinks about a screwdriver?”
  309. The land where time stood still
  310. The vision of persistence
  311. The 1990s called and they want their dialog box back
  312. “Have you ever been annoyed by your Mac’s media keys?”
  313. Early names
  314. Mouse pointer as a mere mortal
  315. “Examining the changelog in its entirety would be a massive task, given that it was now over 200,000 words long.”
  316. CleanShot’s onboarding via settings
  317. The tortoise and the hare live on
  318. “The Helvetica of music notation”
  319. Photoshop’s challenges with focus, pt. 2
  320. About Unsung: Thanks for your feedback!
  321. Book review: Shadow of the Colossus (Boss Fight Books)
  322. UI art from 4096
  323. Tactical dark modes
  324. What deserves a second chance
  325. “The cheatsheet you won’t need.”
  326. “That’s how floating point errors and triangle numbers solved a mystery.”
  327. “Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay.”
  328. Abort, Retry, No, Thanks
  329. “The deeper you look, the more it starts to feel like a platform.”
  330. Out of touch
  331. Recency bias (non-derogatory)
  332. “You could key smash, and it would type out the thing.”
  333. “The fancy software figures it out for you.”
  334. Got your back, pt. 5
  335. If a feature falls in a forest
  336. “The system is so twisted that even Apple itself begs for these reviews from its own apps.”
  337. “It can be really disorienting to scroll around a fully monochrome hexdump.”
  338. Raycast’s confetti cannon
  339. The edge not taken
  340. “Area connected to a given node in a multi-dimensional array with some matching attribute”
  341. “Use links, don’t talk about them.”
  342. Unsung @ 250: Please send me your feedback!
  343. Unsung @ 250: Nine design details
  344. Unsung @ 250: Goals and principles
  345. “To build a thing that immediately feels like you’ve had it forever is very hard to do.”
  346. “Should be no trouble at all for a driver to understand.”
  347. Thoughtful file dropping in Wakamaifondue
  348. “Rather than trying to fix this mistake, the developers leaned into it hard in the sequel.”
  349. The beauty and the terror of oddly-specific commands
  350. “We can have the best of all worlds.”
  351. In search for a more precise cursor
  352. “Deere charges six figures for a tractor. But the farmers were still the product.”
  353. Is this the latest?
  354. “So I wrote a script that takes monthly screenshots of Google and Apple Maps.”
  355. Only time will tell
  356. “Approximately 21 times the estimated age of the universe”
  357. “We’re trying to copy this old machine, weirdness and all.”
  358. “Software is a unique art because it is so reactive.”
  359. Blink comparators in photo editing apps
  360. “Prototyping turned into an excuse for not thinking”
  361. “Every step they take, in every single direction, is right on top of a rake.”
  362. “Subtle line between animations that help and animations that hurt”
  363. Why do Macs ask you to press random keys when connecting a new keyboard?
  364. “And if I were to end this story here, this would be a great story.”
  365. “If you use your computer to do important work, you deserve fast software.”
  366. “It moved too slowly to be an asteroid.”
  367. Linear’s clever internal redesign UI
  368. “I’m hoping that the listeners out there, when they hear it, they’ll feel seen.”
  369. For your consideration: Tab to fix spelling
  370. Anachronisms
  371. Testing tip: Enable the zoom peek gesture
  372. Book review: Maintenance: Of Everything (Part One)
  373. “Naïve, simple, not good enough.”
  374. “There is no quality or historical significance standard.”
  375. World-class female singers
  376. “That’s because the metro cab is his right hand. Videogames!”
  377. “Decentralization does not always equal delight.”
  378. Come at the king, you best not miss
  379. “Less of a pitch, more of a prediction”
  380. Got your back, pt. 4
  381. On tools and toolmaking
  382. To streamline or not to streamline
  383. System shock
  384. Some more placeholder misuse
  385. “Publishers aren’t evil, but they are desperate.”
  386. Bear’s seamless OCR integration
  387. Two nice moments from MoMA in New York
  388. “It takes an airplane to bring out the worst in a pilot.”
  389. “This thing that Tamron’s doing is actually very cool.”
  390. “So, what makes 3D so scary and different?”
  391. One big step forward, three small steps back
  392. “I don’t like it but at least I know. Thanks.”
  393. “Michael here will handle the bullshitting.”
  394. Design is more
  395. The curse of the cursor
  396. User interface sugar crash
  397. “And to make matters worse, complexity sells better.”
  398. “I like to use Soviet control panels as a starting point.”
  399. Night mode predictions
  400. Photoshop’s challenges with focus, pt. 1
  401. “Just because it’s consistent doesn’t mean it’s consistently right.”
  402. Adjust in smaller steps
  403. “Why do we care about numbers? Numbers make me mad.”
  404. “Their attitudes about the issues still shifted.”
  405. Thirteen characters
  406. “We’re going to start out by going to the FAKEY folder.”
  407. “Juggling my phone, my camera, and the umbrella, having to tap the wet screen multiple times to get anything done”
  408. Software proprioception
  409. “A few small details I use to make my interfaces feel better.”
  410. “Houston, we have 1 problem(s).”
  411. “Two lights that you never want to see when you’re landing on the Moon.”
  412. From dawn (or dusk) till dusk (or dawn)
  413. My essay about the Fn key
  414. 🌐 Globe/Fn key
  415. “Durial321 is a banned RuneScape player and a bug abuser.”
  416. “It’s beautiful and kind of mesmerizing.”
  417. “When you make a release that’s okay”
  418. “Kapor had projected first year sales of $1M, but did $53M instead.”
  419. “Make a tiny box that fits around your F1 key.”
  420. “There’s something about it that can’t be objectively measured: It’s funny.”
  421. “I’m obviously taking a risk here by advertising emoji directly.”
  422. A more eager typeahead in Chrome
  423. Not a mountain – but not a molehill, either
  424. “Which is definitely not good to do to it.”
  425. “Podcasts are a radical gift.”
  426. Lock Scroll With a Vengeance
  427. “Your wife’s new legal name is TAARGÜS TAARGÜS.”
  428. “Every time there’s a massive technological shift, intellectual property rights suddenly and very conveniently become a blind spot.”
  429. Deterministic vs. idempotent
  430. “A day some have predicted and many have feared”
  431. “Designed to be loveable by managers”
  432. Tales of direct manipulation, pt. 1
  433. “Simultaneously old-fashioned and futuristic at the same time”
  434. “Our programs are fun to use.”
  435. “Some are papercuts, others a throbbing migraine.”
  436. “Some rather obscure and complex mathematical process”
  437. “It’s not so simple to celebrate a phrase.”
  438. Accidental UI calming
  439. “So long I’m showing it sideways”
  440. Safari release notes
  441. “It’s very small, but still leaves room for creativity.”
  442. Living in the Upside Down
  443. “Please star to express your interest.”
  444. Sins of our Finders, pt. 5
  445. “Just a little detail that wouldn’t sell anything”
  446. Got your back, pt. 3
  447. I’m with stupid →
  448. “I trust in TextEdit.”
  449. “One of the smaller but downright disturbing issues with dark mode”
  450. Tactical version history
  451. “They even thanked the coders for giving them such a difficult challenge.”
  452. “So, I made another tool.”
  453. “Repeat until smooth”
  454. Mailbag: URLs as UI
  455. “These platforms are ad-heavy to the detriment and frustration of users, yet they remain successful and growing.”
  456. Trust your fingers
  457. Make yourself at home
  458. “The reason this never caused a problem before was pure luck.”
  459. Unsung Heroes: Flickr’s URLs scheme
  460. “A design variation that doesn’t make sense”
  461. Book review: The iOS App Icon Book/The macOS App Icon Book
  462. “We internalize so much by doing things slower and making mistakes.”
  463. “The killer app is making calls.”
  464. “Problem solved, right? Well, not exactly.”
  465. Molly guard in reverse
  466. How to make sure a designer never files a bug again
  467. “It’s just a nice thing to have, you know.”
  468. “Hello... I am right here!!!”
  469. “4 billion unique (and sometimes very memorable) sentences”
  470. “Projects just drift toward chaos unless a person is actively holding them together.”
  471. “Maintenance in this larger sense has nothing optional about it.”
  472. “This sounds completely impractical and we love it.”
  473. “See the picture of some guy in place of the X button?”
  474. “These small, repeated experiences shape us more than we like to admit.”
  475. “You’d get knuckle pain if you typed too much.”
  476. “Battered, bedraggled, inexplicably enthusiastic about a bargain flight to Bermuda”
  477. “A demake of a remake of a demake of a game that is ostensibly a semi-sequel/semi-adaptation”
  478. The dusty menus of the world’s most popular desktop browser
  479. “A number of hidden problems in the naïve approach”
  480. “A collection of beautiful letters? A beautiful collection of letters? You decide.”
  481. “It’s a good idea though, and there aren’t even many of those in Tahoe.”
  482. “The floppy disk icon relies on interface familiarity, not object familiarity.”
  483. How to shoot a screen using a board of keys
  484. “Users were gleefully told to reload the game.”
  485. Testing tip: Always show scrollbars
  486. “How do they spit in Korea?”
  487. Three iOS 26 transitions
  488. “State-sanctioned monster executions over a server hiccup”
  489. “As the vision decays or blurs and new features are conceived without consideration of the whole”
  490. The Moylan Arrow of software
  491. “If you did it right, it looks like it was effortless”
  492. “An integer overflow causes an enemy to spawn directly on top of the player”
  493. “The autocorrect battle of wills”
  494. Sins of our Finders, pt. 4: Eject
  495. “1H in a config menu = 10C”
  496. “We can go deeper by patterning inside of our pattern”
  497. “Stuck on level 256 forever”
  498. “Coding typography is not like any other kind of typography.”
  499. “I do not want to tell you about my recent experience.”
  500. “I’m a shame-driven developer.”
  501. “Every Mac’s floppy disk had a garbage name”
  502. Movie review: Koolhaas Houselife
  503. The modern powers of ten
  504. “We made it be ok by being bored and fixing stuff”
  505. “A masterclass in Interaction Design (IxD)”
  506. A good person to follow: David Aerne
  507. “The glossy, shimmering future of computing”
  508. “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”
  509. “Distinct absence of anything that takes away screen real-estate”
  510. “Intentional pagination is progress with awareness”
  511. “The archive itself is not new”
  512. “8–10 hours per symbol”
  513. “8–10 hours per symbol”
  514. Favourite well-made apps and sites
  515. Out of sight
  516. “A hand-wave toward something ineffable”
  517. “Fourth reason: Map makers are lazy”
  518. “Because you haven’t used them recently”
  519. A Japanese word for “cat”
  520. “I’m still grumpy that Apple discontinued it back in 2015”
  521. “Dwarf children die from embarrassment at not being dressed at age 2”
  522. “If you put the Apple icons in reverse”
  523. A nice transit detail
  524. “Before I knew it, I had four damaged sockets and three bad cables.”
  525. “An extremely minor technical problem”
  526. “This glitch didn’t want to be forgotten.”
  527. Designing table of contents
  528. Slow, fast, third thing
  529. Death of the bedroom coder
  530. Making repetitive things less tedious
  531. Book review: Enshittification
  532. “A lot of nice little touches in UI design go unnoticed”
  533. “Everything possible to make this website as fast as they can”
  534. “All comes down to one pixel”
  535. “A gesture that feels unnatural and unintuitive”
  536. “The only way to win was to cheat.”
  537. “An email to the wrong Larry”
  538. Sins of our Finders, pt. 3
  539. Amiga Pointer Archive
  540. TV show review: Mr. Bates Vs. The Post Office
  541. In stereo, where available
  542. “Every time user pressed Enter at a frozen interface screen”
  543. Fonts have bugs, too
  544. A new (old) kind of keyboard
  545. “It’s hard to do a drive-by on your feet.”
  546. A clever disambiguation detail
  547. Fav tech museums
  548. “And they can’t even agree on the direction of an arrow.”
  549. Fun interface on my bike
  550. “Just 3 days before the deadline, I discovered something horrible.”
  551. Remember me?
  552. Book review: Laws of UX (2nd ed.)
  553. Sins of our Finders, pt. 2
  554. “I was inspired by the Comic Sans typeface”
  555. “Christmas lights diarrhea”
  556. A tale of two import windows
  557. “Accidents dropped to zero overnight.”

2025 40

  1. “Confusing, distracting, and aesthetically upsetting”
  2. Got your back, pt. 2
  3. A tiny bit old Windows got right
  4. A nice moment in screenshotting on iOS
  5. “And waited for the rest of the world to catch up. And waited.”
  6. Sins of our Finders, pt. 1
  7. “Moms talking like demons, tough guys talking like little girls”
  8. “Type is not rubber”
  9. Buoyant, Dreamer, Reflected
  10. “The chance was just 1 in 85.”
  11. Book review: Pilgrim in the microworld
  12. “Because it didn’t look crappy enough”
  13. Fitts’s Law at 20
  14. “More or less turned Windows into a carnival”
  15. “Strangely primitive against the backdrop of the slick user interface”
  16. Fav error message
  17. “Expressed in a single picture”
  18. The original loading state
  19. Got your back
  20. “In my greatest hour of need, where were you”
  21. “The focus on optimization was a time-limited social fact.”
  22. “They’re just ugly fonts.”
  23. “Kinda love this error message on the bus”
  24. “It was fun and I learned a lot.”
  25. “The internet is wrong, and I am here to set it right.”
  26. “This cognitive load is invisible and rarely discussed.”
  27. Really into keyboards
  28. “Every aspect of the machine operates as quickly as the user can move.”
  29. “Apple abandons its own guidance.”
  30. “How can I delete and add to library at the same time”
  31. “Ugly in a way that’s pretty”
  32. ⌘-P ⌘-S
  33. “OK cool now we can ship the game phew. But why did this EVER work?”
  34. “Especially helpful during live shows”
  35. “And then the system crashes”
  36. “Never criminalize pride in craft.”
  37. “More nuanced, more expert, interaction design skills”
  38. “Fight my way through it all again”
  39. I wrote about it once
  40. Frame of preference

2021 1

  1. Num Lock

2016 1

  1. an essay I wrote in 2016

2015 1

  1. Ctrl+Alt-based shortcuts on Windows

2014 1

  1. city planning in the 1970s

Undated 1

  1. shows the shortcuts on tabs themselves