A 2021 article by David Hall about shape coding: Chapanis began interviewing pilots who had crashed B-17s and B-25s and a pattern emerged that turned his attention to the controls within the cockpit. As Fitts said ‘the intense effort to produce new weapons, the race against time in industrial production, and the...

A thoughtful look at macOS 26’s application of Liquid Glass by Howard Oakley: I’m sure that, in the right place and time, transparency effects of Liquid Glass can be visually pleasing. Not only is this the wrong time and place, but those with visual impairment can no longer remove or even reduce these effects, as...

A thoughful moment in Buttondown. Gmail’s truncation has been going on for decades, and I have no idea why they still do this. Even the overflow interface for a truncated email is awful – the rest of it doesn’t appear in situ, but it opens a new window that where you have to start from the top. So it’s nice that...

One thing I really admired in earlier versions of Windows was the thing that was also its weak point: the keyboard orientation. I miss the old tradition in Windows where many commands had underlined letters, and you could simply press Alt and that letter to jump to it: If I remember correctly, eventually this got...

In iOS, I like how cropping quietly snaps to things that look like borders, with gentle haptics, without announcing anything: #details #direct manipulation #interface design #ios #touch

A funny 12-minute video by Chris Spargo about why traffic signs in the world are standardized only to some extent. This was interesting to me generally in the context of Europe being more iconographic, and America being more “word-y” in their sign design, which extends to devices, keyboards, and (presumably?)...

I am starting to collect all the problems I routinely find in Finder. I can think of ~15 off the top of my head; maybe this will turn into an essay of sorts. I hope this isn’t too boring for you. Sometimes Finder takes a really long time to update the list of files after something changed it. All my screenshots go...

I have recently been on a bit of a Japan kick, and someone on social sent me this 2018 article from Clyde Mandelin about translating Japanese videogames: There’s a common assumption that when you translate something from English into another language, there shouldn’t be any English left when you’re done. Otherwise...

Oh, this is a fantastic adage I haven’t heard before, mentioned here in 1978, arguing against distorted, or “faux” typography: A Linotype assembly elevator with the gate closed. This is the center of an operator’s attention as the mats tumble down and are arranged automatically in lines. The spacer bands adjust...

I found this weirdly delightful: There are a few new ringtones in iOS 26, but they’re not new new ringtones – they’re sort of “riffs,” or maybe remixes of a default Reflection ringtone. If you don’t have an iPhone, here’s a short video where you can hear them. I’m guessing Apple sees the default ringtone as sort of...

September 6, 2014, was a landmark day in speedrunning history. I like Summoning Salt’s videos about speedrunners because they manage to add a great dose of storytelling to what otherwise would be boring, mundane events, and this one about Punch-Out is no exception. It’s Rocky meets Moneyball, in a way. This pairs...

★★☆☆☆ This could have been an essay. When I first learned about this book from Jacob Geller’s video just months ago, I thought this was another example in the vein of The Power Broker – a perfectly Marcin-coded book that somehow escaped me knowing about it for decades. “Pilgrim” is from 1983, and is a story of a...