In response to my recent interactive essay about interactions, Waider on Mastodon posted a great crystallization of a common problem: There is nothing quite so frustrating as a persistent user interface papercut. You know it’s there, but you keep running into it because the moment you start thinking about what...

From Brad Woods, a messy (in a good way) and copiously illustrated/​animated exploration of “juice,” or: Our wet little term for constant and bountiful user feedback. A juicy game element will bounce and wiggle and squirt and make a little noise when you touch it. A juicy game feels alive and responds to everything...

A funny and occasionally spicy 15-minute video by Nerrel from October 2024 about some of the nuances and legal fights surrounding Nintendo’s fight with community-made emulators: The video paints Nintendo in the harsh light, highlighting their double standards and willingness to throw their corporate legal weight...

Aanand Prasad, Ben Firshman, Carl Tashian, and Eva Parish put together Command Line Interface Guidelines for people who write command-line tools. I like that it harkens and links back to other writing, and is also pragmatic: shares good parameter-parsing libraries, commonly used options, and so on. Here are some...

Every once in a while, I stumble upon a long thread in a random corner of the internet where someone discovers Paste And Match Style, and everyone erupts in applause. “Yeah, it’s a life saver.” “I use it all the time.”“I can’t believe this isn’t the default!” Then, inevitably someone chimes in: “Oh yeah? I can show...

Here’s a big interactive essay I just finished. The theme: What does it take to build interfaces that truly allow for fast operation – and why that matters. If you like the interactive details posts here on Unsung, the essay is kind of a concentrated dose of all that. You can technically read it on the phone, but...

There are tons of small bugs around. Occasionally, there is a really big one. In the “oh my god, I can’t believe it” category, here’s a story of the game Yakuza 6. A few months ahead of launch, in February 2018, Sega released a free playable demo of the game. The demo gave access to the first level, and then blocked...

In iPhone’s accessibility settings you can choose the allowed speed of double- and triple-clicks on its side button (why is it important? we talked about it once), and the interface does something nice – after you make your choice, it shows the expected speed in the same place a sort of a preview: To be honest with...

You might have seen Bret Victor’s 55-minute Inventing On Principle talk soon after he gave it in 2012. If not, you should check it out. If you did, you should check it out again and see how it makes you feel today: It is about interactions but in the service of something grander, which (if I’m doing my job well) you...

I thought about this the other day, and I thought it’d be fun to share this internal tool I made over a decade ago to aid with exploring options for Medium’s typographical redesign. It’s called Fontificator. You can play with Fontificator here (desktop browsers only), or watch the likely confusing video below: The...

The software company Panic has a blog, and has had it since 2009. It has a clean, modern aesthetic that looks something like that: However, something interesting happens as you start going back in time by clicking Older Posts at the bottom – the historical posts are rendered using their original styling: This isn’t...

From the Animation Obsessive newsletter, a fun and nicely illustrated recounting of the way Jordan Mechner animated his seminal games Karateka and Prince of Persia. It’s rotoscoping, as everyone knows by now, but on a hard difficulty mode: Mechner’s setup for Karateka was wild. Over his Moviola screen, he taped thin...