When you start a new game in SimCity 2000 (you can try it in the browser yourself), as the city is generated, you see a few messages fly by: Creating Hills, Tracing Rivers, Smoothing. Among them, for a bit, one can see “Reticulating Splines”: If it was not obvious from seeing Smoothing followed by More Smoothing and...

This was a fun 15-minute architectural video from Stewart Hicks (absolutely worth a follow otherwise) that mapped precisely into the same kind of tension and internal debate I sometimes feel when talking about minimalism in UX design: Minimalism is good! Until it’s not! One interesting lesson here is that the famous...

I keep thinking about this very good 11-minute Not Just Bikes video about traffic calming. In it, a simple argument is made: the posted speed limit of any given street or road doesn’t really matter. What matters is how the street feels. Generously wide and separated lanes, sparse traffic lights, and the road being...

This from a blog post by my friend Glenn Fleishman about audio/​video settings in macOS just made me laugh: It’s doubly funny if you are aware of Fleishman’s extensive experience in printing. Also, this: I guess this is how I keep humble. Despite decades of using a Mac, I can still miss a Video menu in an audio...

I thought Safari’s release notes are pretty good – exhaustive, direct, something you won’t ever read for pleasure, but something you can actually learn a lot from even if you are just scanning. I wish either MDN or Can I use… integrated them in some way (and, of course Chrome’s and Firefox’s as well), so that...

A really interesting 28-minute video by daivuk about making a first-person shooter game QUOD that fit in just 64 kilobytes: I found watching it strangely enthralling and even nerve racking. The creator keeps adding stuff that seemingly has no chance of fitting into such a small space – textures! sounds effects!...

As you progress in your UI design career, you learn that there are quite a few unsolvable challenges: do you write My Items or Your Items in UI? do you put hand cursors over buttons? for a boolean item (especially in the menu), do you talk about the present state or the future state? do you try to solve for change...

An interesting crowdsourcing effort from Mimestream that asks users who want snoozing to pick up a phone and dial their representative put pressure on Gmail to add that feature to the API. I wonder how much of a chance of succeeding this has. The issue has been open since 2018, and was reopened in 2023. It has over...

I feel macOS these days starts feeling like Windows in the 1990s where occasionally some core component of it breaks, and a reboot is necessary to restore it to full functionality again. But even with that in mind: this happened literally right after the reboot, with nothing much happening and no other signs of the...

The breathing light – officially “Sleep Indicator Light” – debuted in the iconic iBook G3 in 1999. It was originally placed in the hinge, but soon was moved to the other side for laptops, and eventually put in desktop computers too: Power Mac, the Cube, and the iMac. The green LED was replaced by a white one, but...

A nice moment spotted in Slack: By definition security and usability coexist wearily, so it was nice someone thought about allowing me to do this at an opportune time, rather than at a random moment that might be extremely untimely or stressful.#got your back #security

I think a lot about bugs or design decisions that make software appear dumb. At some point in my career I started fitting everything against two principles: “don’t make your app treat your user as if they’re dumb” and “don’t make your app itself feel dumb.” To wit: This is, very obviously, my website. I have made it...