From its earliest days, Macs established an interesting convention – whenever you press a keyboard shortcut to an action that’s somewhere in the app menu, the matching top menu label blinks quickly. Here, I am pressing ⌘A (Edit > Select All), followed by ⌘+ (Format > Font > Bigger), and then ⌘B (Format > Font >...

The Game UI Database is a website that covers the interfaces of almost 2,000 games via over 75,000 screenshots. It has meticulous information architecture, so you can jump into specific sections, for example: Game difficulty settings Game UI settings menus Modals and pop-ups Loading screens HUDs Minimaps Even if...

Various old computers had their keyboards adorned with unique symbols. Companies like Commodore, Atari, Amiga, or even – in its previous life – Apple chose to put their company logos on keys, and there were other weird and obscure keys on weird and obscure keyboards. But it was Apple’s recent push to move their...

Buttondown, a newsletter publisher, has a pretty standard CSS editor in its web app. You can edit the code and whenever you make any change, you can then press the Save button to make it go live: The view also thoughtfully supports pressing ⌘S to do the same thing: However, if there is nothing to save, ⌘S is ignored...

There are two distinct flavors of speedrunning: completing a game as fast as possible through feats of extraordinary mastery, timing, and precision, completing a game as fast as possible by finding all sorts of bugs and exploits in the game (commonly known as “glitches”) that allow the player to find eerie shortcuts...

Anthony Hobday is a product designer and I like his approach of cataloging and sharing references on his website. Here are some choice pages: Uncommon, but useful design terms Notes on software quality and What is good craftspersonship? Notes on visual design and Visual design rules you can safely follow How...

Any Mac app that has to ask for system permissions has its work cut out for it. In a previous post I showed “the MacCharlie method,” which looked like this: DaisyDisk, a disk cleanup app, does something different. First of all, I like that the app icon is animating here to indicate it’s movable. It’s a version of...

I know, I know. I’m supposed to say iPod’s click wheel, or the Western Electric 500 rotary dial, or maybe the first Nest. But, have you ever played Super Sprint? It was Super Sprint that had the first amazing rotary controller I’ve ever used, and the whole cabinet design told you the game was very well aware of...

A few nice moments that caught my attention in Marek Minor’s case study of designing icons for Cursor. The diagonals for “cancel/​wrong” icons are always backslashes, and all the “positive” icons are always slashes: There is a system that provides 1-to-1-and-only-1 mapping between a concept and an icon: The point of...

Ivory is a Mastodon client, and their account switcher has a few interesting mechanics. The standard one is that you can tap on your avatar, and get a menu in response: But you can also drag down on the avatar, and get a different reaction: This, I believe, is meant to be a slightly faster way. The settings option...

Many years ago, I put together a quick proposal of what I called “responsive text” for social proof: I think you get the idea – instead of dumb truncation, the underlying code could prepare a few strings conveying the information with different levels of specificity, and then the UI could choose the longest one that...

An interesting take from a screen annotation app ScreenBrush – instead of a standard “don’t show again” checkbox modifying a button, it shows two buttons as a fork in a road: I am not sure I have ever seen it laid out like this before, and I am not sure if it’s good, as it does force a user to make a choice where a...