As someone who’s been a keyboard shortcut tzar at a few companies, I developed a certain kinship with the unknown and unnamed others who have the same job elsewhere. It’s a fun but weird challenge, rewarding and unrewarding at the same time, a job of maneuvering a little dinghy between the winds of Motor Memory, the...

1. One of the classic parables about loading goes as follows. A building manager had a problem: people were complaining about the elevator being too slow. But upgrading the elevator was an enormous expense, so the manager came with an alternative solution: they put a mirror next to the elevator call buttons. Even...

I liked this post by Roel Nieskens, about ten lines of code that, one way or another, mean something to me. Either because I wrote them, or I extensively copied them, or they made me laugh. Or cry. It’s perhaps a different take on cursed knowledge, and made me wonder what those would be for me, or for other people...

In response to a previous post, one of the readers wrote this: I would phrase this as the fault of the animation having violated the Hippocratic oath for animations, which is “first, do no harm” a.k.a. “first, don’t interfere with user input”. Yes, one has to be afraid of hyperbole – was there ever an onscreen...

I wrote recently, about macOS, “it’s hard when the operating system cedes its responsibilities to provide good design patterns,” and Mac developer Brent Simmons in a recent essay shares a parallel line of thinking about how unreliable and untenable designing with the basic macOS UI components has become: But there’s...

On his fascinating and long-running Windows dev blog The Old New Thing, Raymond Chen writes about the story of scrollbar right-click menus: Windows 2000 added a right-click menu to the scroll bar. This menu gave you four options that matched existing mouse operations, two operations that matched existing keyboard...

À propos the previous post, wanted to share a 2019 article by Gregory Travis about the two Boeing 737 Max disasters that shook the world in late 2018 and early 2019. It’s titled How the Boeing 737 Max Disaster Looks to a Software Developer, and I found it fascinating, well-written, and filled with great details. The...

From The Verge: Apple has developed an unexpected workaround to prevent the iPhone 18 Pro Max from being hit by shipping restrictions on big batteries. There’s a “battery-firmware solution” in place on the new iPhones, according to Apple’s support page, which keeps capacity below the 20Wh limit for single-cell...

In 1996, Street Fighter Alpha 2 was ported onto Super Nintendo Entertainment System, a 1990 machine on its way out and not really up to the task of running such a modern game. The team put up a hell of a job, involving adding a custom compression chip, with the game being much better than anyone expected – but still...

Here are a few nice and interesting design decisions I spotted on various websites in the last months. The pinball repair forum Pinside shows specifically how much time has passed between posts. This is great for orientation and especially when catching up or revisiting – history always gets flattened, and this...

Designer Reimar Servas goes further than the usual Border Radius Discourse and thinks about the deeper but often ignored questions of border radii as a system, and about the consequences of such a system that go beyond visuals: […] These redesign efforts suggest ignorance of a fundamental problem: rounded forms have...

A fun lil convention from the financial app YNAB’s release notes page – there is always a headlining feature with a hero shot and a long description, but the smaller improvements are still listed as “pocket change”: #release notes