A pair of essays has been rattling in my head for a while. First is Kyle Chayka from October, in “TextEdit and the relief of simple software”: Over the past few years, I’ve found myself relying on TextEdit more as every other app has grown more complicated, adding cloud uploads, collaborative editing, and now...

As a Mac user I naturally focus on that platform, but Windows 11 has had its own share of problems – and that list has grown so vast it’s hard to know where to start. So let’s pick it up at random, with a post by Thom Holwerda with a great title “You can actually stop Windows Explorer from flashbanging you in dark...

I have been enthralled with this tiny feature in Google Sheets called “Show edit history,” which premiered in 2019: Mind you, it’s not unconditional love. The execution feels a bit clunky, showing the edit values in a pop-up rather than in situ, with formatting that feels too heavy, and an awkward “No more edit...

A 12-minute video from Tech Rules about how the 2000 PlayStation game Spyro: Year of the Dragon dealt with software piracy: The video extends upon a 2001 Game Developer article by Gavin Dodd, but Tech Rules adds a good intro about PlayStation’s modchips, and then actually shows the piracy protection in action. I’m...

Palette cycling is an interesting technique borne out of limitations of old graphic cards. Today, any pixel can have any color it wants. In the 1970s and 1980s, you were limited to just a few fixed colors: as few as 2 for monochrome displays, or 4, or 8, or – if you were lucky – 16. Some of those fixed palettes,...

A nice 2024 essay by Jim Nielsen about the process of “sanding” user interfaces he’s working on: One of the ways I like to do development is to build something, click around a ton, make tweaks, click around more, more tweaks, more clicks, etc., until I finally consider it done. The clicking around a ton is the...

My post about Flickr URLs gathered some interesting responses (especially on Mastodon, thank you all!), so I thought I’d do what podcasts call a “mailbag episode”! Some people pointed out other good examples for inspiration. Chris Silverman: The idea of URLs as user interface elements is such a good take. I’ve seen...

A good batch of history and observations by Nick Heer at Pixel Envy about ads coming to AI chatbots: It is incredible how far we have come for these barely-distinguished placements to be called “visually separated”. Google’s ads, for example, used to have a coloured background, eventually fading to white. The...

For a few months now, when re-running search queries in Bluesky’s iOS app, I ended up occasionally arriving on the wrong search, and it happened enough that I started suspecting something’s afoot. (Ahand?) So I opened the app on my Mac via iPhone Mirroring, and started clicking testing carefully. This is what I saw:...

This is a nice way iOS Safari behaves the moment you tap one of the font size buttons – it immediately ejects all the other chrome: After Liquid Glass specifically, we seem to be going through an interesting re-evaluation of whether “the content is the king; it should feel expansive and UI should get out of the way...

An interesting 14-minute video about a bug in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas: San Andreas was released in 2004, but the game started breaking only after Windows got updated… in 2024. Turns out the bug was sort of a ticking time bomb just waiting for the right set of conditions. We covered one similar bug before, in...

Half of my education in URLs as user interface came from Flickr in the late 2000s. Its URLs looked like this: flickr.com/photos/mwichary/favorites flickr.com/photos/mwichary/sets flickr.com/photos/mwichary/sets/72177720330077904 flickr.com/photos/mwichary/54896695834...