Here’s a 2002 story from a younger internet, by programmer Trey Harris (link to the original and if you don’t like the classic Usenet formatting – my browser’s reader mode can’t even prettify it! – here’s a nicer-looking format): “We’re having a problem sending email out of the department.” “What’s the problem?” I...

A delightful 24-minute video from ToffeeBun about sampling in videogame music and how it changed over the years: The video helped me understand the difference between tunes purely synthesized from soundchips, those sequenced with samples (e.g. MIDI or sound trackers), and those that are completely “streamed” (e.g....

I love looking at origins of obvious things, because of two things: They help me get unstuck. If you go far enough, you will find out that even the most ossified conventions that are older than you haven’t always been this way. They put me in the mood of “what of the things that feel normal today that deserve to...

I have mixed feelings about Raycast announcing their move from the native interface to one powered by web tech (this is the same thing that made Photoshop’s dialogs so bad), but their blog post announcing the change has at least a useful list of some details that separate good native apps from bad web ones. I think...

Chrome’s find option, like every search coming from a good home, does something clever with accented characters – it normalizes them: No matter whether you search with a proper accented character, or with its basic Latin equivalent, all the same stuff matches: The “ø” letter is treated the same as “o” both in the...

I witnessed this Siemens locomotive depart yesterday and for a second I thought I was losing my mind. Then, I smiled so hard: Turns out, the startup melody was intentional in this particular model. The power converters have to adapt the current from the overhead line to convert it to the three-phase motors of the...

Turns out that the breathing light survives, sort of, not really, in an Apple product today: The AirPods Pro case does this when charging – right at the start, or when you tap it later. But it disappears after a while, the pace is now 28 breaths a minute (over twice as fast as the original iteration), and the light...

This DOS demo called Wake Up! is astonishingly small – only 16 bytes: The demo doesn’t just make QUOD feel gargantuan. Output this one solitary emoji, “Woman Technologist with Light Skin Tone” – 👩🏻‍💻 – and you spent all your 16 bytes, too. (Proof!) The creator’s write-up is a bit hard to follow, but there are some...

The iOS 26 update introduced a bug in the Czech keyboard. Instead of the customary háček (ǍǎĚěǦǧǏǐǑǒǓǔY̌y̌) in the bottom row, another key was duplicated, removing access to the accent character (or, a diacritic) very popular in that language. Here is the before and after of this situation: Ordinarily, this can be...

A simple rule for overflow logic that will prevent your app looking a bit stupid… …is to avoid “more” expanding to just one item. If the expansion takes up as much room as the UI to show the expansion, why not show it in the first place?#details #interface design

A reader asked me this, and I thought I will answer here: One bit of challenge with [where I work] is that my audience isn’t already almost-guaranteed to be into design! They’re hopefully interested in making good software in general, though, and probably curious about the app [I’m building] they could be using. I’m...

I like the Fits on a Floppy manifesto by Matt Sephton: Software should be as small as it can be. Not as a gimmick, but as a discipline. The floppy disk is the measuring stick: 1.44 MB. If the software that ran entire businesses could fit in that space, then a modern, focused, single-purpose tool certainly can. In my...