This is incredible – a story of a museum exhibit that replicated an experience of being a tech support person for a videogame company some time in the early 1990s: You knew hint lines existed, right? 1-900 numbers, long-distance charges, hoping whoever answers actually knows what they’re talking about. They had...

In 2009, there was a strange one-off build of Chromium with a guy’s face in place of the close box: If I remember the story correctly, this was neither a bug, nor an Easter egg, but instead a joke’y punishment for not delivering the correct asset on time.#google #humor

Many people already linked to Terry Godier’s thoughtful essay about email and RSS and the dangers of skeuomorphism by default: Email is where the metaphor made its jump from atoms to bits. “Inbox” was borrowed legitimacy. It sounded like that wooden tray, so it inherited its psychology. But the wooden tray had a...

I’m slightly suspicious of this story (and the video inside) that Unix commands were made so short (cp instead of copy, mv instead of move, ls instead of list, and so on) because the console keyboard had really unpleasant keys. I imagine it must be a confluence of many things, not just this one. Shorter means faster...

I thought about it on Masto in January (the responses are interesting if you want to read), but recently Robin Sloan eludicated it a lot better: What makes the AI chatbots and agents feel light and clean, here and now in 2026? Is it an innate architectural resistance to advertising, to attention hacks, to...

I have zero nostalgia for Mario, and yet I was surprised how much I enjoyed this 30-minute video by Sheddux: It serves as a bit of design history and even critique of early Mario games, and then in the middle it turns into an analysis of the Mario port on Game & Watch – an obsolete technology even in the 1980s, and...

This menu in Chrome feels like a surface running away from its creators: I think cerebrally I understand the subtle difference between Show and Always Show, but is that difference worth it? Because at some point the repetitiveness and heaviness of that top section is casting a huge shadow over the rest of the menu....

A fantastic 37-minute video by Nic Barker that explains ASCII, Unicode codepoints, and their relationship to UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32. I learned a lot, and I never thought I’d walk away from the video appreciating the craft of text encoding. Also, really good storytelling! #encoding #typography #youtube

This is neither the first nor the last time I’m sharing David Jonathan Ross’s work; today I want to link to a really fun glyph explorer he put together recently: That’s it. That’s the tweet. On this blog I generally want to capture the meaning of well-made things, deeper thinking, going beyond cheap sugary delight,...

A few thoughts after reading Gruber’s take on Finder and its new auto-sizing columns: 1. Column view as a concept and when done well deserves to be in the UI hall of fame. It flew and still can fly high in the Finder, and it was the unsung hero of both the iPod and the iPhone. It’s really fun to fire up NeXTSTEP 0.8...

Just a few hours after writing about floppy disks, I stumbled upon a bona fide floppy icon in the Bluesky’s iOS app, anno domini 2026: I imagine this, in a nerdy view deep inside settings, might be more of a fun nod, but it made me curious – does Word still use a floppy icon? Yes, it does! Right next to the...

Everybody who routinely takes screenshots on a Mac knows very well the motor memory heaven and hell that are the screenshotting shortcuts: ⌘⇧3 to grab the whole screen, ⌘⇧4 to grab part of it, hold ⌃ ahead of time to put the result in the clipboard, press space at the right moment to select a window, hold ⌥ at a...