You might have seen this, one of the strangest and most primitive experiences in macOS, where you’re asked to press keys next to left Shift and right Shift, whatever they might be. Perhaps I can explain. There are three main international keyboard layout variants in common use: American (ANSI, with a horizontal...

A 21-minute video from Karl Jobst about a 2025 videogame cheating scandal: In short: One of the professional teams in the FPS game Squad built a sophisticated set of scripts that made it easier to use the game for esports tournaments by adding additional UI, useful stats, a floating camera, an extra...

Two great posts about interaction latency on the hardware and software side. First is from Ink & Switch: There is a deep stack of technology that makes a modern computer interface respond to a user’s requests. Even something as simple as pressing a key on a keyboard and having the corresponding character appear in a...

In the previous post, I wrote: I understand that the best way to compare two things visually is to switch between them promptly in situ; our visual system is really good at spotting even small changes when aided this way. I thought it would be fun to talk about it briefly, because it gives me a chance to show you a...

I was impressed with this clever internal interface at Linear, shown inside this larger blog post: The dev toolbar exists directly inside the app and allows us to easily toggle feature flags on and off. When something didn’t look right in the refreshed UI, it took us just one click to compare it with the previous...

This 25-minute segment on MKBHD’s Waveform podcast (video or audio, segment starts at 40:21) is from November 2024, and is a nice counterpart to the post about favourite well-made apps and sites. The original theme is “what is an app that you use all the time, and like to use, but is actually a bad app?” but it...

A few years ago, I suggested adding a new interaction to Figma. If your text cursor was on a misspelled word (anywhere inside, or the edges), you could press Tab to quickly accept the suggested correction, without even seeing it: Independently, Google Docs approached it from a slightly different angle, but landing...

#easter eggs #humor

Go to Settings > Accessibility > Zoom, and then turn on “Use scroll gesture with modifier keys to zoom.” Then, at any moment, you can hold Control and swipe with two fingers (or use a scroll wheel) up or down to zoom the entire screen. I’d also recommend turning off “Smooth images” under “Advanced…” so you see...

★★☆☆☆ The new book by Stewart Brand is tackling a subject that’s important to me. The introduction struck a chord: The apparent paradox is profound: Maintenance is absolutely necessary and maintenance is optional. It is easy to put off, yet it has to be done. Defer now, regret later. Neglect kills. What to do?...

This is a thoughtful post from Florian Schulz about designing a typeahead experience. I liked the details both within the implementation – for example, making sure the kerning is preserved! – but also in the presentation. I particularly enjoyed Schulz making the component demo itself, rather than using prerecorded...

Multibowl is one of my favourite emulation projects because it’s a rare example of using emulators creatively, rather than for nostalgia or research. It’s a 2016 game by Bennett Foddy and AP Thompson that reimagines older existing games as smaller pieces of a new, Super Mario Party-like experience. Two players...