On the most recent episode of the Waveform podcast, the hosts talk about two new announcements in the MMORPG world (relevant bit starts at 1:21 and goes on for 14 minutes): The context is this: RuneScape launched in 2001, and World of WarCraft in 2004, each game already had a “relaunch”: RuneScape via Old School...

À propos the last post, from music editor Marc Weidenbaum: The first is don’t let anyone or anything, or anything acting like anyone, or anyone promoting anything, convince you that craft is outdated or will ever be outdated; you will only improve, only make the sounds you imagine in your mind’s ear and feel in...

I linked to his work before, and here’s The Art Of Storytelling with another interesting video – about what made Jobs such a good presenter: I’m not going to spoil the findings, which are presented well with good corroborating examples. But the most interesting thing to me was one short video snippet of Jobs being...

My favourite piece of writing I’ve done about motor memory remains “Shift + Shift” from 2018. I have linked to it over the years, but if you haven’t checked it out yet, you might find it interesting. Just this week, I have had another similar moment, and amazing in a slightly new way. How many of you tap ⌘1, ⌘2, ⌘3...

Yet another entertaining speedrunning video from Karl Jobst – this one about a recent new discovery in Quake: What was really fun about this one was the fact that the design of the level puts a splinter in player’s head – you see a bridge above on the left, and you just have to wonder: is it at all possible to,...

Hiding inside this page on “user-driven UI” by Brad Woods are two useful things. The first is the concept of “zone of proximal development.” The idea, as I understand it, is that possible tasks you face span a few categories: stuff you already know how to do, stuff you can learn to do on your own, stuff you can...

Nice moment in iOS: when you reduce the volume to zero, subtitles come up automatically – and they go away the moment you increase the volume again. This is from YouTube on the iPad, but it appears to be system-wide: (Feels extra meaningful in the face of so many people playing their media on speaker in public these...

Over the years, I learned about many gotchas and strange differences between keyboard handling on Mac and Windows – pertinent especially to web apps, which use the same codebase to cater to both. I thought it might be helpful to someone if I compile them all in one place. This post is meant to be a reference, and...

Here’s what happens when you try to update your Android phone if it’s low on battery (even if it’s connected to a charger): It’s a pretty cheap error UI, a misaligned string thrown carelessly in between existing interface pieces. It doesn’t even bother explaining what “too low” means. Compare this to what the...

A fun little video by Bofner talking about how two Castlevania games on the original Nintendo Game Boy achieved a certain visual effect that wasn’t technically possible: What I really liked was this sequence of events: Game Boy introduces a special immovable layer to accommodate HUD/GUI elements within games (such...

At the end of the previous post in this unexpected series about iOS Safari’s tab control design, I wrote: This is how interaction systems slowly fall apart. […] It is likely that Safari’s exception will now be treated as “blessed,” and start spreading further. Given enough time, more and more pills will go in...

There is this lesson every programmer learns when building or debugging something, and it’s “reduce your blast radius.” Let’s say I want to draw some stylized text showing current time in some code I haven’t touched in a while. Instead of doing all that in one fell swoop, I should: use a non-changing test string,...