Jim Nielsen's Blog
Jim Nielsen's Blog
Jim Nielsen
Opinions with a shelf life. Made by Jim Nielsen.
Latest Posts
As icons continue to change across Apple’s platforms, I have thoughts. They mainly revolve around two perspectives: What I think of icons as a long-time user of Apple’s platforms. What I think of icons as a digital collector and physical...
“We asked 100 people: What are the top three companies on earth best positioned to make a world-class Mac-assed Mac app?” Buzz! “Apple!” Survey says: Yes! Apple at the number one spot. Makes sense. Who better to make the very definition...
I made some updates to my notes blog, including a change to how my “Shuffle” feature worked. Figured I’d blog about it. Shuffle? On a Blog? At the time of this writing, I have 974 “notes” that I’ve published. For fun, I have a “shuffle”...
I was popping off about negation being an act of creativity, when Blake Watson introduce me to the idea of the “This Page Intentionally Left Blank”-Project (Internet Archive): In former times printed manuals had some blank pages, usually...
I quite enjoyed this talk from Bryan Cantrill where he discusses the difficult engineering problems they overcame while working on their company Oxide. Some of the problems they ran into were bugs. But these weren’t any ordinary bugs,...
If you have’t heard, Om Malik passed away. People are sharing stories of their graceful encounters with him. This one is mine. Back at the beginning of 2021, I set a goal to write 72 blog posts. I was puttering along, publishing whatever...
John Gruber writes about those annoying popups every website seems to have now and while he does a great job tearing into these ubiquitous, user-hostile patterns, one of the things that stood out to me about his piece was this meta...
Consistency serves a purpose in visual design, but it seems to have become the purpose of a lot of visual design. Look no further than these evolutions of macOS icons (image courtesy of BasicAppleGuy): The Creator Studio icons are...
You’ve probably heard the term. It’s meant to convey how difficult it can be to start something. “Blank page paralysis”. But for my money, beginning is easy. Finishing is the hard part. In software, they call it “the last 90%”. In...
Golf content on social media is my online junk food and the other day I came across a video interviewing professional golfers that asks: “What does an amateur golfer have to shoot to be considered good?” It’s a leading question because...
Code isn’t just a way to implement a design, it’s a way to find one. With an interface, you have to use it, feel it, interact with it, and poke at it to see the relationships between things. Change X, see Y react. If it doesn’t feel...
The very first computer programming class I ever took introduced me to the idea of there being different kinds of numbers, like integers, floats, and doubles (it was a C++ course). “You mean, when I assign a variable, I have to say up...
I’ve been slowly listening to Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Essential Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger. I like his practicality. He’s never trying to be overly academic, as if he needs to prove how smart he is. He says Berkshire’s...
This is an iconic observation: If you put the Apple icons in reverse it looks like the portfolio of someone getting really really good at icon design This isn’t, however, just the story of Apple’s Creator Studio icons. It’s the unfolding...
Here’s Scott Jenson in his insightful piece “The Ma of a New Machine”: the chatbot interface [makes us] feel like deep cognitive work is happening. But the interface is fundamentally reactive. It spits complex text at you, you skim it...