Many of you have probably heard the repeated story of the first Moon landing in 1969 almost getting undone by a bunch of onboard computer glitches: There could not be a worse time in the flight to have computer problems. At, the time the press gleefully reported how Armstrong seized manual control from a crippled...

This iPhone UI for dark/​light theme is doing something clever: Ostensibly, there are two modes here: automatic, for when you want the theme to match the time of day manual, for when you want to keep one of the themes forever But check out what happens when I am in automatic mode, but toggle the theme by hand...

I just published a new photoessay about the history of the Fn key, and particularly what Apple has been doing with it recently. Do we need yet another person crashing out about Apple’s design decisions? Am I doing it only because it’s fashionable to be on Apple Design Hate Train these days? I’ll be honest: I don’t...

RuneScape is a popular MMORPG that reached its peak popularity in the late 2000s. In the game, combat – colloquially known as PvP, or player vs. player – is limited to a specific map area (called the Wilderness) and otherwise people’s houses. On 6/6/6 (sic!) a bug in RuneScape made it possible for a few players to...

I’ve learned recently that “rubber banding” can mean at least three different things in the context of UI/UX design: whatever happens at the edges of your scroll container when you’re using elastic scrolling, which started on the first iPhone and have spread more widely since in videogames, balancing the difficulty...

I saw this fly by before, but just today I learned that Pride versioning is a tiny project by Nikita Prokopov, whose work I shared before: The author says: This is a parody and a homage to the awesome Semantic Versioning. …but I think it stands on its own. You can’t have craft without being at peace with pride and...

I mentioned VisiCalc not long ago and Lotus 1-2-3 just this week. Yesterday, a new issue of Stone Tools came out, nicely tying the story together. Stone Tools is a project by Christopher Drum where he grabs old productivityapps, spools up the correct emulator, and writes a review from today’s perspective. I like the...

⌘T is a very important shortcut in Slack. It allows you to quickly talk to someone just by typing in their name. I use it probably dozens, if not hundreds of times a day. ⌘T is right next to ⌘R, which reloads Slack. Occasionally, on the way to ⌘T, my fingers graze ⌘R. Fingers being fingers, I immediately realize...

This video from Marblr about adding fall damage to Overwatch is really intense – 45 minutes of length and a lot of footage of frantic gameplay – but really informative, too. It’s a great case study of how something seemingly really simple – deducting health from the player as they fall from height – can be a...

It’s hard to imagine it now, but during iPhone’s first year, no emoji were available at all. It took four years until 2011’s iOS 5 gave everyone an emoji keyboard. But in between 2008 and 2011, there existed a peculiar interregnum where emoji were only available on Japanese iPhones. The situation had to be carefully...

I just stumbled upon a nice little power-user innovation in Chrome’s Web Inspector. In Safari, and previously in Chrome, when editing CSS properties, you’d get a usual editing typeahead for the property name, and then the same on the other side for the property value. In newer versions of Chrome, the typeahead menu...

I know we’re probably collectively a bit tired talking about macOS Tahoe, but I just noticed something that I think is a good example of how small details can ladder up to bigger things. This is macOS Sequoia (the pre-Tahoe release) and a typical pop-up button: One clever thing macOS has been doing since basically...