A nice and I think effective notification preview in Retro, with a verbatim sample text of a notification right below its name: Not only you can see exactly what you’re going to get and make a much better-informed decision, but the app even uses actual names of your in-app contacts, so you can relate to the...

I know I’m usually driving the Finder pretty hard, but I think that’s a necessity, given its position as the center of macOS for power users, and its situation where it feels like Apple pretty much gave up on it. But I also want to show things that Finder does well, and this might be something no one does nearly as...

Speaking of breaking search, an absolutely horrendous design decision I just spotted when using Bing Search: Yep, you saw this correctly: as you scroll, the ads (already pretty much masquerading as regular search results) actually get bigger to grab your attention. Jesus. I don’t know why I was reminded of this fav...

Thirteen years ago today, Google killed Google Reader. In 2023, The Verge wrote a great piece about the shutdown: Google’s feed-reading tool offered a powerful way to curate and read the internet and was beloved by its users. Reader launched in 2005, right as the blogging era went mainstream; it made a suddenly huge...

If you stepped into the dwarven capital of Ironforge on September 13, 2005, you would find only bones. Lots of bones. The city, along with every other major population center in World of Warcraft, had been ravaged by a plague that slaughtered players by the thousands, their bleached bones covering every street. This...

In 2023, Neal Agarwal created The Password Game, a viral browser-based game. Wikipedia has a nice summary: Although the initial requirements include setting a minimum of characters or including numbers, uppercase letters, or special characters, the rules gradually become more unusual and complex. These can involve...

In my three decades online, it has never occurred for me to try this, and I found it so delightful once I did – both Chrome and Firefox will quietly rewrite backslashes in URLs into slashes: Not Safari, however, even though the URL living standard says it should. I am very curious if the presence of backslashes in...

Even before the “remaster,” my essay about the Polish S bug was routinely discovered by Hacker News and other places, so I thought I would take a look at all the commentary over the years and summarize. First, pragmatically, these are the lessons for any keyboard shortcut designer: On Windows, AltGr (Right Alt) and...

I praised ⌘⇥ recently in my essay for cleverly not showing itself when you press the keys really fast. Here’s another nice detail. If you press and hold ⌘⇥, you will eventually stop at the end. (You can then press ⌘⇧⇥ or ⌘` to go in the other direction.) However, if you are already at the end, pressing ⌘⇥ again...

For decades now, Raymond Chen has been posting to his blog The Old New Thing about various technical Microsoft quirks, occasionally venturing into Unsung territory. Last week, Chen shared a nice remembrance of Tony Krueger, a person responsible for implementing the red squiggly underlines in Word: Tony worked on...

Apple might have undone the macOS Tahoe menu icons decision, but this wasn’t the only contentious iconography issue in their ecosystem. On his blog, Jim Nielsen writes how Apple filed away so much expression by forcing rigid icon bureaucracy in macOS. Nielsen focuses mostly on distinctiveness; previously, you could...

Speaking of remastering (and diacritics), I grabbed my older Medium deep dive called The curious case of the disappearing Polish S, and put it on the new site. It looks so much better than on Medium and while I was at it, I’ve redone all the visuals, and updated it a little bit.) It’s still probably one of my...