Around the time I was writing about iPhone’s Safari breaking the expected “tap to jump to the top” gesture, a conversation on social media pointed to yet another thing that this tab control does strangely. A typical use of Safari means two groups of sites: a regular set on the right, and “private” pages on the left...

A fun 19-minute video from commonLuke trying to write a short Fibonacci program in increasingly esoteric languages: Here are the languages: Python, Scratch, and assembly (as control), LOLCODE, a language resembling lolcat memes of yore, Piet, a language whose output looks like Piet Mondrian’s abstract art,...

As a teenager I adored Norton Commander, learned some UI magic from early videogames, and dreamed of a Mac my family couldn’t afford. But I think the first product that taught me something truly memorable in terms of user experience was, of all things, Excel 97. Excel 97 cooked. It was rendered in brand-new,...

Let’s Game It Out is a YouTube channel where Josh Knoles occasionally grabs a modern videogame and tries to play it in a particularly creative way – finding bugs, breaking things, doing an action more times than anyone thought possible. What makes it even more fun is that what’s tested often are early access,...

Bear (a notetaking tool) has simple image resizing, with one extra nicety – if your images are near each other, resizing one will snap to the width of the other: In the Finder, columns snap to the width necessary to keep all the names untruncated – and not one pixel more: (Sidebar: This is also the only place I’m...

Earlier this month, I talked about a rotation button in photos that behaved really nicely in iOS, and not so great on the Nothing Phone. Here’s a story of a similar fumble iOS once made that might bring the point home even more. The calculator app has been preinstalled on iPhones ever since their debut in 2007. For...

When you visit parts of the website of the Driver & Vehicle Licensing Agency in the U.K. outside of standard office hours, you will see this: It seems ridiculous, almost like the famous 500-mile email bug, but Dafydd Vaughan explains how it came to be. It won’t be a surprise that the story starts with an old...

Nikita Prokopov on his fun Tumblr-like site Grumpy Website that collects UI transgressions with light commentary: Why log in when you have to, when you can instead experience the same Kafkaesque maze of pages, redirects, confirmation emails, copying codes, and searching for a second device—all a week in advance? I...

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...

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 for an unexpected reason: Joanna Stern explains why this emoji is correct today: 📅. (This one too: 📆) I thought the two different calendars was some trickery, but the...

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,...

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...