★★★★☆ (as a book) ★★★☆☆ (for the purposes of this blog) There are as many books about Steve Jobs as there were Quadra models, but they focus mostly on two phases: 1955–1985 – Steve Jobs befriending Wozniak, the early days of Apple, Lisa, and the Mac 1997–2011 – Steve Jobs’s “second act” at Apple, and the creation of...

Welcome to another Super Mario Sunday! This is an 11-minute video from gruz talking about the fascinating world of South Korean bootleg Marios, such as Super Boy, Super Bros World, and Super Bio Man – existing solely because of Korea’s subpar copyright law of that era: In short: The code was copyrighted, but the IP...

A nice moment in the iOS emoji keyboard – after selecting an emoji from the grid, its name shows up for a second: I have small reservations here, as reusing a placeholder like this trips up my “this is cheap” alarm. But otherwise I like that this – just like keyboard shortcuts in menus or tooltips – ambiently...

Two nice follow-ups to topics we covered before. In February, Nobert Heger did some analysis of precisely which pixels in Tahoe are intercepted by mouse when trying to resize a window. In April, Steve Ruiz, author of tldraw, did this more extensively for all the drawing apps like Canva, Figma, Illustrator, and so...

Ever since I wrote a post about the molly guard, I have been on the lookout for those, and I think I collected enough to do a little follow-up. First, some classic industrial molly guards from a museum in Germany: This IBM electronic typewriter had a gorgeous perspex molly guard around the power button: Other...

In 2021 and 2022, product manager Steven Sinofsky wrote a… …first-person account of what I saw at the PC revolution from the perspective of joining Microsoft as a newly hired software design engineer fresh from graduate school working on developer tools, through my time as a program manager and ultimately leading...

This is not italics. This is not even oblique. This is a side effect of how those displays work. Instead of a whole rectangle of pixels being changed at once, the display is updated line by line, starting from the top one. As it’s moving towards the bottom, the internal horizontal position might have already...

Interactive explainers are one of my favourite things about the web: people passionate about things introduce them to others, for free, with care, and often using some interesting interactive or educational approaches in the process. I picked a few I particularly liked for this post. These aren’t just explaining...

The otherwise excellent note-taking app Bear has an interesting bug that’s worth talking about while it’s still here. When you’re around to-do items, you can press ⌘. (period) to toggle any task complete or incomplete. It’s actually a really fun shortcut in practice: But when you have a larger selection with a mixed...

I hate lorem ipsum with passion, but guess what? There’s more intentionality in it than I assumed, and even easter eggs, as this fun 25-minute mini documentary from Emily Zhang/​Rabbit Hole shows: You can tell that this was not the work of an amateur. The garbled text is done with a lot of care and knowledge. You...

In last week’s post, I made an off-hand comment about Vercel’s Geist Pixel announcement, and I thought it might be interesting to turn this into more of a full-fledged critique. I don’t think it’s a good announcement, but its flaws are pretty universal, so I want to put words to these flaws. This will extend to a...

A nice moment in Google Maps – if you are travelling by public transit, an indicator shows not just the current stop on the list in real time, but also exactly where you are in between stops: It’s not just something traditionally delightful, a cute big icon moving smoothly. I also think it’s very helpful. Travelling...