Perhaps the only ever musical that’s about a buggy piece of software. From the inimitable Cabel Sasser, this 2006 video about Saints Row, with three songs and a goddamn reprise at the end. It’s very good. my car door’s freaking out it seems to be forever in the concrete barricade I wonder how I’m ever gonna drive...

Was always so inspired by this pattern in Mac OS – showing me an extra bit of information only and exactly when it was needed: I just saw a version of it in Nova, the text editor: #details #interface design #nova

I hope it’s okay for me to link to my work once in a while. Today, I published a photo essay about my favourite tech museums. A lot of it doesn’t have to do with software, but in general it’s about craft and good user experience in this specific context. If you are interested specifically in software, the ACMI part...

Yet another good post by Nikita Prokopov, continuing the theme of icons in Mac OS Tahoe (previously), going into more depth: In my opinion, Apple took on an impossible task: to add an icon to every menu item. There are just not enough good metaphors to do something like that. ¶ But even if there were, the premise...

This still remains one of my favourite pieces of UI ever designed. I know this is is not software, but this to me is exactly the right kind of “delight” in this context. (Apologies for a shoddy video.) #real world

A really fun 2021 story by Fabien Sanglard at the perfect-for-me intersection of bugs and typography. In 1991, just days before the final deadlines, Akira Nishitani, one of the graphic designers of the absolutely seminal arcade game Street Fighter II realized they misspelled the world “Warrior” as “Warrier.” The...

One of the frustrating patterns for me is a dialog box that doesn’t offer “skip it next time” option, or even just defaults to remembering. My go-to examples? Apple’s Remote Desktop which always throws this thing up on connection: And this in Photoshop upon saving a PNG file, which has been there forever: I never...

★★★☆☆ I was delighted by the Laws of UX website when it came out. The site was beautiful (it still is!) and it felt important to bring some of this stuff to designers earlier in their careers. But the book based on the website was largely a disappointment, and seems like a good case study of an unsuccessful...

When you accidentally rename a file to a name that already exists, Finder tells you about it, and then just dumps you out of rename, so you have to enter rename mode again and type the desired name. This feels like such a 1990s way of doing things: throwing a dialog box and washing your hands away from the...

I hate most font reveals; they’re written in a pretentious, corporate-meets-Design-with-capital-D way that’s devoid of any value or meaning or feeling, with the requisite highly polished motion graphics that feel pretty like empty sugar calories. They did feel like written by AI before that became a meme. This feels...

I was just looking at some old 1980s screenshots and wondering “why don’t you ever see syntax highlighting in inverse video”? And then I randomly stumbled upon this deep dive into syntax highlighting from Nikita Prokopov. I don’t know if I disagree with everything here, but there’s a lot of great stuff in there, and...

Bear – beautiful, whimsical, delightful, but dry on the details. This window was on the screen for many minutes: Obsidian (or, at least, the suggested Obsidian Apple Notes import plugin) – functional, informative, precise, but a bit on an uglier side: As the meme goes, why not both?#bear #details #interface design...