A good quick essay by Ahmad Shadeed about a mistake I bet I committed myself, too – switching to a full-width style too soon with responsive design, which makes pages look strange: Shadeed argues that this ugly responsive interregnum happens a lot more than people might assume, as part of natural window management...

★★★★★ (as books) ★★★★☆ (for the purposes of this blog) I still remember Mac OS X arriving on the scene with icons that felt infinite in every possible way: in size, in color palette, in dimensionality. We got used to them over the last quarter century, but Michael Flarup’s books rekindled that feeling for me; the...

Another good post from Roger Wong thinking through Anthropic’s findings on how offloading coding effort leads to understanding less: So the AI group didn’t finish meaningfully faster, but they understood meaningfully less. And the biggest gap was in debugging—the ability to recognize when code is wrong and figure...

I was randomly checking the Wikipedia entry for killer apps – apps that were so good that they single-handedly made people buy a particular hardware platform just to run them (Wii Sports for Nintendo Wii, Super Mario 64 for Nintendo 64, and so on). There are some interesting nuggets in there I didn’t know, like...

I was embarrassed for Apple when I saw the recent bug fix for columns introduce a new bug, explained in this post by Jeff Johnson: Without the path bar, the columns are now taller, but the vertical scrollers remain the same height as before, leaving vertical gaps, a ridiculous amount of space between the bottom of...

Old-school computing has a term “molly guard”: it’s the little plastic safety cover you have to move out of the way before you press some button of significance. Anecdotally, this is named after Molly, an engineer’s daughter who was invited to a datacenter and promptly pressed a big red button, as one would. Then...

The UI for filing bugs is inscrutable and has too many hoops to jump through. No one does anything unless every field has been filed meticulously and there is a clear repro. The designer is ridiculed if the thing isn’t actually a bug, is a duplicate, or if it was filed in the wrong place. Front-end bugs are...

An 8-minute video by Bread on Penguins about some fun uses of terminal: I am pretty sure this is nothing new for heavy command-line gurus (and heavy Raycast users, and so on), but I found it delightful to see someone so excited about creative uses of the terminal, and it made me realize how much time I do waste...

I liked this little microinteraction by Mario Guzmán explored on Masto – it felt like a clever idea to help you locate a tiny widget on what might be a huge screen or two: But it also made me think. I still strongly associate macOS shake with “wrong password,” meaning “you’re doing something wrong” – something the...

I spotted this interesting thing at work today, and was curious about that phrase at the end: Turns out, it is basically a unique human-readable encoding of a 32-bit digit, I’d guess particularly for ease of voice/​phone support communication. (Otherwise I imagine copy/​paste would work well?) Asana has been doing...

Complementing my previous post, a lot of great thoughts in this post about invisible work from Hardik Pandya: When the project succeeded, her work had dissolved into the project’s infrastructure. The doc was just “the doc.” The tracker was just “the tracker.” The alignment was just how things were. People forgot it...

I learned from Diana Berlin’s always excellent newsletter Diagonal that Stewart Brand has a new book out, and it’s about maintenance, and it’s published by Stripe Press. From the introduction: This book, I’m pretty sure, is the first to look at maintenance in general. It asks: What can be learned if you think about...