I saw this screenshot the other day (link): I never particularly liked those “cute” app updates that were all the rage some… 10 years ago? Or app updates that are too generic. I always felt the updates should be informative, and I occasionally like seeing what’s actually being fixed, and sometimes learning from it....

Savage from heliographe.studio on Threads (via Daring Fireball): #apple #humor #iconography #mac os

Even though this blog is about software, I might occasionally post some inspiration from real life. I saw this today outside of an RTA transit station in Cleveland. I have not seen it light up, but I imagine it would blink when the train is near the station, which would mean: hurry up if you want to catch the next...

Speaking of hardware: Always loved this 1998 Australian story (magazine scan or an easier-to-read transcription) of a very particular computer virus that did not require any software to spread “like a Sydney bush fire”: Now it all became clear. One of the female sockets must have deformed when I first reconnected...

I mentioned speedrunning before in the context of mastery, but there is the other side of speedrunning that’s equally interesting: that utilizing bugs (or, glitches) to get the fastest possible time. This 17-minute video by Msushi covers “one of the most loved and broken glitches in Portal 2” and the strange...

A fascinating deep dive look at one of the most well-known bugs in computing history, the 1993 Pentium FDIV bug. Ken Shiriff actually grabbed a microscope to analyze the processor and mapped out exactly what happened on the hardware level, and the details of Intel’s (surprising) fix. Also, an interesting detail of...

I added a table of contents UI to the most elaborate essays on my site, and then wrote about some of the design details and choices I made there. Let me know if this is an interesting case study! I tried to do something new here with tons of mini videos. At the bottom, I will also be collecting other implementations...

Let’s say you are in Reeder (an RSS reader for iOS), looking at the list of posts, and already from the title you know you don’t care, and you want to mark it as read. You can tap to see it and then swipe back the moment it shows. This is the slow path. There is a faster path. Reeder enables you to slide right or...

A 16-minute video from Ahoy from last year about Chris Sawyer, creator of Transport Tycoon and Rollercoaster Tycoon games from the late 1990s. The video focuses more on the economics of the industry and some technical details, but what’s interesting to me was how tight those two games felt in terms of UI. They have...

One of my favourite recently-noticed little patterns is this one thoughtful accelerant in iOS Photos. If you want to add a photo to an album, you normally have to choose from a list of albums: However, once you do that one time, a new menu option appears. It’s effectively “Add again quickly to the album you just...

★★★★☆ I liked this book. I consider Cory Doctorow a good, smart writer. He can put together one good sentence after another (“this is why the roads leading to Amazon depots are littered with sealed bottles of human urine”), he can tell stories of boring things in riveting ways, and he can connect various themes and...

John Gruber (twice) on macOS Tahoe rounded corners (previously), with a nice bit of archeology: It was, I’d argue, a small mistake for Apple to stop putting a visual affordance in the lower right corner of windows to show where to click to resize the window. It was a bigger mistake to change the scrollbars on MacOS...