Night mode is a mode inside the iOS camera app where the app takes a longer-exposure photo in low-light conditions, but “stabilizes” it programmatically, to achieve something similar to holding a camera on a tripod for the same amount of time. I noticed a little detail that might be new to iOS 26: the night mode...

You can tell the story of Mac OS via the story of its settings, and the same is likely true of Photoshop. Recently, spelunking in the preferences of Photoshop 2025, I found this extremely curious thing: To transcribe: Focus mode limits the appearance of certain optional user interface messages so that you can use...

I mentioned before how the old-fashioned pixels on CRT screens have little in common with pixels of today. The old pixels were huge, imprecise, blending with each other, and requiring a very different design approach. Some years ago, the always-excellent Tech Connections also had a great video about how in the era...

In the video linked in the previous post, one of the hosts mentions at one point: The biggest rebuttal is that the greatest audio engine of all time, the one baked into all Apple products, has 16 volume steps. And no one has ever been like, “My iPhone doesn’t have enough granularity to the volume.” But of course...

MKBHD’s Waveform podcast (audio or video) sometimes has a fun “Did they even test this?” section. This week, for the first 12 minutes, the team was ranting about various volume controls – a meandering conversation that I also found just very enjoyable. The cited answer to “why do a lot of car volume controls max out...

I have been at times frustrated by cute placeholder text in places, most notably Dropbox Paper, which still puts them in a just-created doc… …and in new to-do items: This bothered me for two reasons. First was a potential tone mismatch. What if you are writing a layoffs announcement, a project cancellation doc, or...

Nice, clear, simple copy in ClarisWorks from 1997: No “Maybe later.” No “Not now.” Thirteen characters. Now, Later, Never. (Can’t help but notice that Esc and ⌘. – the classic Mac’s equivalent of Esc – still map to Later, however. Also, this breaks the rule of button copy being fully comprehensible without having to...

One of my favorite bits of trivia about the 1983 movie WarGames is that all the computer typing scenes have been faked in a clever way: The actors (many of whom might have never typed before, as home computers were only slowly becoming popular) were allowed to press any key they wanted, but the interface would still...

I know some of you are all whispering “he’s posting all of these hour-long YouTube videos, when am I supposed to find time to watch them”? I hear you loud and clear and I’m going to make it better… …by sharing this four-plus-hour long YouTube video by Jenny Nicholson from May 2024 – just so those other videos will...

There are fun things you can do in software when it is aware of the dimensions and features of its hardware. iPhone does a cute Siri animation that emanates precisely from the side button: A bunch of Android phones visualize the charge flowing to the phone from the USB port… …and even the whole concept of iPhone’s...

I enjoy little lists like these, and the presentation here is also delightful. From a design engineer Jakub Krehel, Details that make interfaces feel better. A few of these stood out to me: Make your animations interruptible. […] Users often change their intent mid-interaction. For example, a user may open a...

In my head, some bugs belong to categories that feel important, and yet remain hard to define and quantify: embarrassing bugs, dumb bugs, flow killers. Somewhere in the hard-to-explain space is another tricky category: UI decisions that feel cheap. The examples of cheapness that come to my mind readily will, I bet,...