From Dmytro Tovstokoryi at Mintlify: I recently joined Mintlify as a part-time design engineer. […] I started a daily thread sharing UI fixes and improvements that I was shipping. I also invited people to share any UI bugs they noticed. People responded. I fixed things in near real-time. It was fun and I learned a...

Computers Are Bad is an acquired taste and I’m acquiring it. This was an excellent post going deep into the myths and anti-myths of elevator close door buttons, and pedestrian crossing buttons. I love storytelling + rigor: First, anyone who says that the “door close” buttons in elevators are routinely “not even...

From Scott Jenson’s 2021 post about Tesla 3 interface, this is so clever (emphasis mine): Edward Tufte has this visual rule that 1+1=3: With a single line on the screen, you have just that single object, but adding a second line does something interesting, it adds a third ‘object’ on the screen, the negative space...

Appreciate little moments showing utmost keyboard orientation in Raycast. The millisecond you hover over the back button, the app says “you should be using the keyboard for this”: I am not sure you often see tooltips on buttons, with keyboard shortcuts only: Every select menu – even those with literally two options...

Evergreen and inspiring from Craig Mod, a 2019 plea for fast software: Google Maps is dying a tragic, public death by a thousand cuts of slowness. Google has added animations all over Google Maps. They are nice individually, but in aggregate they are very slow. Google Maps used to be a fast, focused tool. It’s now...

A good post by Jim Nielsen about icons in menus (in Tahoe). This posture lends itself to a practice where designers have an attitude of “I need an icon to fill up this space” instead of an attitude of “Does the addition of a icon here, and the cognitive load of parsing and understanding it, help or hurt how someone...

An absolutely eviscerating 18-minute walkthrough of Apple Music for macOS Catalina, from a few years ago. More funny than anything else, but a reminder to test the “boring” edges of your app – like a state with a lapsed subscription, or coming back after a few months. There’s no way to drag and drop. […] If I want...

I gave a talk about the craft of pixel fonts at Config last year, and this fresh YouTube video by Noodle seems to be a great and quirky companion to the whole issue of “how did pixels look on old CRTs,” including many examples from modern games.#games #graphics #history #youtube

A really interesting convention I just spotted in DevonThink that shows the shortcuts as soon as you hold ⌘, although it feels a bit clunky and cheap in execution. (The main worry here for me would be that it’s distracting if you already know the shortcuts. I haven’t noticed it disappear if you use it, but maybe it...

Tom Forsyth wrote about a fun bug in a Half-Life 2 reissue, of a particular flavour I have never heard before. So I started it up, selected new game, played the intro section. It’s a fairly well-known section - you arrive at the train station with a message from Breen, a guard makes you pick up a can, and then you...

Fascinating quick walkthrough of Strudel on TikTok from DJ_Dave (sound on!). Sometimes you see an interface and you immediately just sense how efficient and fun and powerful it is, without ever touching it. Very bretvictorian in a way. Also related: a recent video from Benn Jordan walking through obscure music...

From Nina Kalinina’s excellent revival of a forgotten 1983 GUI, a discovery of a hilarious accessibility bug: VisiOn loves to beep at the user. It beeps every time a menu option is chosen or an on-screen button is clicked. If you are tired of the noise, you’d appreciate that Application Manager has an option to...