I have a confession to make. I prefer Apple TV’s 2015 remote: The remote was universally ridiculed for its “which way is up?” problem – too much vertical symmetry which didn’t give your hand enough cues to know whether you’re picking it up the right way or the wrong way. Apple tried a half-measure first; in 2017...

On April Fools in 2021, the popular xkcd comic ran Checkbox, which was a Morse code puzzle in disguise. (It’s interesting to see the community trying to figure out what it actually does.) Engineer Max Goodhart built the front-end and wrote a summary of the whole project: This year was a doozy. We specced and...

The Pixar animated short Lifted was released in front of Ratatouille in 2006: I’ve always been amused by this imaginary interface, which is so clearly not how any sort of computer would work. Or so I thought. These are photos I took in Melbourne in 2024 of CSIRAC, Australia’s first digital computer from about 1949:...

A surprising entry in the thread started by Photoshop and continuing through screwdriver handles is this 11-minute video from Errant Signal about a platformer game called Derelict Star: I was inspired by the video, and really enjoyed its exploration of a demanding game that’s composed of just a few mechanics that...

Should you ever be worried that displaying just one glyph could take almost 2 seconds and slow down your website by as much? Naw, of course not. This wasn’t a problem already in the 1980s and, in the lord’s year 2026, computers are pretty good at rendering a letter or a symbol at a moment’s notice. Ha. I was just...

I found this 9-minute video from Rex Krueger about screwdriver handle design really interesting in the context of my post about Photoshop’s dialogs. Screwdriver handles evolved over the decades in response to user needs and usage patterns, with a few clever affordances: some for everyone, some for specific use cases...

It’s hard to be in charge of continuity on a movie set. It would already be difficult under the best of circumstances: after all, you can’t freeze the sun in the sky, prevent hot drinks from going cold, cigarettes from extinguishing themselves, or entropy in general from doing all the stuff it loves doing. But on...

I want to show you something glorious. This is Bear, the note taking app: There are desktop apps that get flustered if you ⌘+Tab away and back, misplacing focus or closing a dialog box inside. There are iOS apps that fully reset themselves whenever they get swapped out of memory and have to be reloaded. But Bear,...

This is perhaps my favourite feature in Lightroom. You press ⇧T, you draw a few lines, and presto – your photo is now even: This is doubly magical to me. The first part is that this is even possible – that you can straighten the photo in both dimensions after the fact, and save for some parallax nuances the viewer...

In our Unsung yellow pages, in between people writing Chrome plugins to fix UI of other apps, and gamers creating mods to fix bugs that the developers leave behind, we need to make some room for another category of apps. Some time ago, Daniel Kennett created a little utility called Keyhole with a singular purpose:...

The original 2004 Gmail iteration of the now-ubiquitous modern status bar (here presenting undo send) was internally nicknamed a butter bar because… well, just look at it: (I believe at least Google today calls this a snackbar.) The UI pop-up element hosting Google Talk inside Gmail – the very same thing that’s more...

I gasped when I first saw Lightroom do this: I know this won’t have the same effect on you just watching. What happened was that, after I clicked on the Disable button, Lightroom moved the mouse pointer for me. I don’t think I have ever seen anything like this, and it provoked many thoughts and emotions: This feels...