On her blog, Lea Verou makes a case that each user-facing website dark-mode toggle should only ever show two options, but in a smart way. The challenge is that any dark mode toggle needs to actually accommodate three options: dark, light, and the default “whatever the system says” (which can be always dark, always...

From Marton Barcza at TechAltar, a good 12-minute video analyzing what went wrong with the famed Live Tiles that Microsoft was pushing throughout most of the 2010s: Now, among Windows Phone fans the pervasive opinion is that Live Tiles have failed because Microsoft did a poor job with them, which I think is at least...

Minimaps are an interesting UI element because they often feel very exciting – something about things being small, or responsive, or maps just being cool? – but fail to actually be useful. I find minimaps for coding particularly tricky because, at least in my world, code all looks very much the same from far away....

Sopwith is a 1984 videogame made by David L. Clark for the original, seminal IBM PC model 5150. It sports the distinctive 4-color CGA palette and an equally distinctive PC speaker soundtrack. It’s also one of the oldest videogames still in active development, and I was surprised how enthralled I was learning about...

A strange thing happens when you press Enter on an empty item in a list in most text editors – the entire list item disappears: This feels counterintuitive. Isn’t Enter for committing and adding more things? Wouldn’t Backspace be the right key to press to break a list? Yes, and no. I am not sure who invented this...

An interesting 20-minute Config talk from the Instagram designer Rose McManus: It covers some of the same areas we recently talked about: diacritics and Polish S (and a fun video about English conventions from a while back), but it tackles them on a higher level. McManus talks about how people express themselves via...

Mac’s operating system has a peculiar way to install apps. An app typically arrives in a file with a .dmg extension (it stands for “disk image”; my brain always reads it as “damage”), which upon double clicking becomes a kind of a drive. You go inside the drive, and there is the app icon. But the journey isn’t over....

If you’re a professional web app, your key shortcut situation is not to be envied. Once the operating system grabs the ⌘ shortcuts it requires (⌘M to minimize, ⌘H to hide, ⌘Q to quit, etc.), the browser has its turn, claiming everything from ⌘R, T, N, L, W for tab operation, to ⌘F, P, O, and S for other things. And...

Speaking of computers that used to stop running if you looked at them funny, a few years ago I wrote about the Monkey app that was there on the original Mac. Many software engineers will recognize the premise – Monkey was just a chaos script randomly pressing mouse buttons and keys during the night hours, and if the...

Contra the previous post, just spotted this “Same settings, new look!” callout in Firefox, on a page I have never visited before, talking about a feature I have never used: I mentioned this once – when you get someplace new, everything is new. This redesign announcement’s conditions were engineered poorly, because...

I wanted to show you a year’s worth of messages from my barber’s software, because this is what software should be. No spam, no upsells, no growth hacks, no unwelcome cuteness or puzzling verbosity. It’s so curt and straight to the point it should be set in a 1970s Helvetica: The appointment’s tomorrow. Any...

From Robin Sloan: Yet we should never forget that the product of work isn’t only the work — it’s also the worker. Doing the work changes you; the up-close expe­ri­ence trans­forms your capa­bil­i­ties and even your desires. Insights and ideas emerge from that interface, and I believe the agent mae­stros lose a lot —...