This is a really nice set of transitions when pinching in and out in Photos in iOS 26. This is trickier than it seems, because it’s not just a linear zoom (like it would be in Maps or Sketch, for example). It’s a zoom and reflow – from 3 items to 1 item per column – which makes things a lot more complicated. Here...

Adam Engst at TidBits did the lord’s work of transforming the “sweating details” slide from WWDC26’s opening keynote… …into a nice, human-readable list of 264 items. It’s an impressive list that garnered universally positive reactions, but I have one observation: “Fast” and variants thereof appear on this list 59...

In game development, there is this strange effect known as “tunneling.” It happens when you do collision detection. Imagine a simple situation where every time you move a cube, you also test whether it touches the wall – and if it does, you make it bounce off of it. This works great, but if you move and detect the...

A quick post from Paul Kafasis at the software company Rogue Amoeba, talking about making update notifications less annoying: Though [the open source update framework] Sparkle serves us very well, it has one notable downside. Update announcements are most likely to appear at the least convenient time: right after...

I linked to a bunch of speedrunning videos before, but this 43-minute video by hbomberguy from 2018 is a good introduction to the whole concept and why people care: It’s really funny, romantic (maybe a bit too romantic), and it has a few great examples and explanations of the different kinds of speedruns that...

John Gruber on Daring Fireball: Perhaps the worst UI crime in MacOS 26 Tahoe was the inexplicable decision to add inscrutable, distracting icons next to every item in the menu bar. You will recall Jim Nielsen writing about it, rightly describing it as exactly the sort of thing that Mac users look down upon in...

A reader sent me this screenshot from PowerPoint, with one of the menus looking the best it’s ever looked, and the other one showing to work with what we could charitably call “a UI hangover”: It’s obviously bad craft and crossing over to the “embarrassing” territory, but I thought it’s an interesting question: what...

A nice little old-school moment from Flickr: When you accidentally type the name of the new photo album in the search field instead of the “new album name” field, Flickr just passes on that value to save you from having to retype it: (I bet you witness a version of this all the time when dealing with “I forgot my...

1. In last year’s essay at Tedium, Ernie Smith investigated the rise and fall of screensavers, those pieces of software that peaked in the 1990s, originally meant to prolong the life of your display by kicking in after a period of inactivity, but eventually becoming “self-contained art projects.” As it always...

John Gruber at Daring Fireball talks about a problem in SwiftUI-based macOS and iOS apps where undo is completely broken during text editing: Basic stuff that’s worked reliably for decades — some things that heretofore had worked forever — are dangerously broken. If you’re running MacOS 26 Tahoe, open Journal and...

Nick Heer’s analysis of Apple’s Pages interface over time is a nice counterpart to the recent post about Sinofsky doing the same for the early years of Microsoft Office. Here is the key comparison, 2011–2025: I’ll let you read the whole excellent analysis and Heer poking at the notion of “content over chrome” which...

A nice blog post by Nathan Manceaux-Panot on Pending Design about the subtle design of the tabs underneath the search results in the programming editor Nova: Through buttons right below its text field, the bar also lets you filter results: only show files, only show symbols, or only show symbols in current tabs....