This 9-minute video from the fun game show Lateral (with Tom Scott!) covers a particularly interesting bug in the 1984 game Karateka: If you don’t want to watch the video and try to figure it out alongside contestants, you can read more about it here, and also see it in action. Karateka was made by Jordan Mechner...

Many designers and engineers have Apple products with their flawless and praise-worthy trackpads. By default on macOS, trackpad means only “shy” (iPhone-like) scrollbars are shown. Shy scrollbars become half-visible when two-finger scrolling, and only fully visible when hovering over them. To anyone working on...

An entertaining 9-minute video by Shloop that starts with a common mistake of typing in an English mode on a Korean keyboard, but then goes through a bunch of other fun and light input internationalization stories: This is the page for non-English programming languages that is shown at some point. Quite a bit of...

This first one – in response to pressing the volume buttons – feels world-class. Subtle responses to buttons being pressed, nice haptics, good physics: This one – stretching of the control center – made me incredulous. The performance and physics of it all are good and fluid, but this feels like absolutely the wrong...

This is a really funny story happening in the online universe of Final Fantasy 11: Once killed, a notorious monster shouldn’t respawn until after the next monthly tally, but lately defeated notorious monsters in Limbus have been reappearing early. That’s because, Square Enix said, “the server-side data recording the...

I recently learned of the OG App from 2022, which offered an ad-free, simpler experience to users frustrated with Instagram changes. The app didn’t last – it couldn’t last – but it was a fascinating statement. In a different corner of the internet, Michael Leggett, one of the former Gmail designers, created Simplify...

After James Moylan’s death in December, we were reminded again of the Moylan Arrow, the little arrow telling you which side of your car has the little fuel door: I started wondering: what would be the conceptual equivalent of this in software? My best guess would be iOS offering to fill the one-time code from a...

I read Mike Monteiro’s book of pre-pandemic essays called The collected angers. The book has less to do with the subject of this blog, but I grabbed a few quotes that resonated with me and seemed relevant. In order not to make it too reductive, I’m also linking to the original essays for those who want to follow up:...

A nice counterpart to my post from a few days ago – a 5-minute video by philive of more kill screens from various classic arcade games, with simple explanations. #bugs #games #history #youtube

I liked the angry website Bugs Apple Loves because it’s hitting on something that got me worried in recent months: Apple has been bad at bugs for a while now, but we might be overfocusing on giving them crap solely for some of the most visible – even visual – Tahoe stuff. This is a condensed list at the time of...

If you plug in a CD drive (he said with a straight face in the lord’s year 2026), and then eject too soon, the system offers this dialog, which allows you to say: Eject whenever you’re done with whatever you have to do. But more modern media, like SSD drives, don’t show that window. The best case scenario is that...

One of the most potent themes in Stanisław Lem’s writing was the fallacy of first contact. Lem argued that we are just not ready for an actual meeting with something truly alien. That the most open-minded of us are close-minded on a cosmic scale. That sci-fi made us think that aliens will look like human with...