In 1982, the videogame Yars’ Revenge for the Atari 2600 needed to show a “neutral zone” in the middle of the screen. The console was so primitive – an entire great book was written about this – that it didn’t have any video memory. Any cheap effect would do, even random noise… but something as simple as generating...

A few readers wrote in response to me sharing Panic’s blog to say that they witnessed online publications doing the same. Here’s a 1993 essay by William Langewiesche from The Atlantic Online (sic!) that’s still on the web – which, by the way, you should read because it’s really great writing – juxtaposed with a...

Duff’s device is a C language technique that looks like this: send(to, from, count) { register n = (count + 7) / 8; switch (count % 8) { case 0: do { *to = *from++; case 7: *to = *from++; case 6: *to = *from++; case 5: *to = *from++; case 4: *to = *from++; case 3: *to = *from++; case 2: *to = *from++; case 1: *to =...

On the most recent episode of The Talk Show podcast, this monologue from Jason Snell made me nod my head (the passage starts at 1:35:47): [… Apple] decides to do a big feature. The circus comes to town, they build the feature, they launch it, they leave town, and that feature sits there. And the problem is, there’s...

For a while, the digital artist James Dalzell Hodge kept a video diary of various design decisions while making his next game. This 13-minute video is interesting because it harks back to my mention of diegetic interfaces just a few days ago: It’s a nice quick dive into the subject – a rare coverage of what...

A week of heads up before the payment happens The specific amount I’ll be charged shown Clarity about what is renewing and what I’m getting out of it Even a reminder about what Nova is, in case I stopped using it Seems obvious, but so many places fail at some, and sometimes all of these.#nova #panic #writing

I keep thinking about MacCharlie, this strange product from 1985 that turned the original Macintosh into a dual-purpose machine that could also run software by its chief competitor, early PCs: I’m fascinated by it because it almost feels like cargo culting: “hey, PCs are big and ugly, so if we make a Mac big and...

This is what happens when you go to the homepage of Gemini and start typing quickly: Mechanically, I think this is React or some other framework setting focus again with some delay, but the end result is… rather disturbing. While the technical solution would be to fix the problem or at least do not set focus again...

Since we’re talking about pixel art, in this 30-minute video, Stuart Brown known as Ahoy embarks on recreating an illustration called Four-Byte Burger: The original picture was created by artist Jack Haeger on an influential computer Commodore Amiga in 1985, on prototype software that “was in such an early stage of...

The videogame MainFrames was released on Steam and Nintendo Switch in 2025 to positive reviews: MainFrames invites you to meet Floppy and to browse a clever and charming platformer that plays out entirely within the windows and desktop of a PC monitor. You won’t want to press the escape key on this cozy outing!...

Before I say anything, I’d recommend you just visit the site of a new little app called Liquid Radius, click around, and see how you feel (don’t install it, though!): So. One of the design memes surrounding macOS 26 Tahoe from last year – the one with Liquid Glass – was this screenshotted quagmire of mismatched...

When taking screenshots, macOS at some point followed iOS and introduced a “floating thumbnail,” which serves as a proxy of the screenshot you just took – you can drag it somewhere, open it to annotate, etc. The thumbnail is a nice gesture. The problem is that I rarely do the things it enables, so the thumbnail is...