I know software updates can be exhausting these days; on top of regular weariness of things changing, there’s contentious stuff like Liquid Glass, or thoughtless AI integrations. So, I’m curious: What is a recent software update, anywhere, that made you happy? Something that made an app genuinely better for you, or...

John Gruber at Daring Fireball penned a short eulogy for Maestral: As of today Maestral continues to work just fine. I don’t know when these certificates are expiring. And I don’t know what I’m going to do when they do. Dropbox enshittified its app – my friend joked once that Dropbox is a rare example of a company...

I have never been particularly fond of “shake to undo” on the iPhone. It’s not a pleasant gesture to perform, I feel like typically I don’t have strong enough of a grip on my iPhone to invoke it without fear, and the gesture often undertriggers, requiring an even harder and more cumbersome shake, etc. etc. (One...

It’s Button Week here on Unsung, and here’s a 10-minute video by Jago Hazzard about the door opening/​closing buttons on London’s tube: We previously covered elevator buttons and the enduring myth that – at least in America – they are just “pacifiers,” disconnected from the elevator’s systems. The door opening and...

I have to admit that when a reader wrote to me and said… Every point release of BBEdit delights me. I live in BBEdit. It’s one of the few packages for which I read through the release notes every time (they often have spots of hilarity). …I got a bit concerned. One thing that I hate more than wasted release notes...

A truly fascinating 17-minute video where Chris Siebert at 100th Coin ventures out to play Super Mario in a way where every single byte of code and every single byte of graphics are used, and then shows his work: There was something about seeing the visualization of the entirety of the code being “used” that made me...

(This is a meta post about this very blog. If that’s not interesting to you, skip to the next one!) Here are some improvements I’ve made to Unsung in recent months. Always curious of your feedback or pointers to places that do these things better! Weekly emails I made it so clicking on every (non-YouTube) video or...

From Nilay Patel, a recommendation for the best printer of 2023: Here’s the best printer in 2023: the Brother laser printer that everyone has. Stop thinking about it and just buy one. It will be fine! The Brother whatever-it-is will print return labels for online shopping, never run out of toner, and generally be a...

The last post about the Nothing Phone not buffering its button presses reminded me of something. Here’s IBM Selectric, a 1961 typewriter: Past decades get compressed into a singular point in time, so we might all think of Selectric as “yet another old typewriter,” and I definitely did before learning about it. But...

One thing I was (and still am) worried about when it comes to my recent big interactive essay is that by showing all these classic desktop examples, the whole thing might appear old-fashioned, relevant only to a bygone era. Yet, the challenges it shows are universal. Here’s something I just spotted. This is how you...

I liked this page I just learned of called Incomplete List of Mistakes in the Design of CSS. It might not mean much to you if you don’t write CSS, but could be fun to check out if you do. Here are some choice quotes: border-radius should have been corner-radius. It shouldn’t be !important — that reads to engineers...

A fun (and funny!) 9-minute video from Linternet User about designing a perfect onscreen lever with the right amount of juice: Love seeing real work in progress like that, plus it ends up in a place I didn’t expect. It was also great to see “delay and snap” action elucidated so clearly. It feels like a variant of...