An interesting mechanism in YouTube I just learned of. If you right click once, you get their context menu: If you right click again, you get the native browser menu: This is clunky and not discoverable, but I can see YouTube team’s bind here. As far as I know, it is not possible to extend browser’s native right...

★★☆☆☆ 2018 / 92 minutes General Magic was a company started in 1990 by some of ex-Apple staffers, working on a pocket communication device and its operating system (Magic Cap, sporting a fascinating room user interface). The product launched in 1994, but swiftly failed in the market, similarly to and concurrently...

Have you ever seen this? The best way to predict the future is t̷o̶ ì̴͇n̵͓̆v̶̝̕ȇ̷̝͈̩͊̇̾̄̂̀̈̔̀͛͋͆̓͒͘͝ͅn̸̦̙̣̤͓̜̼͙̲͔̺͚̮̬͆̇̇͐̇̽̒̎t̵̮͎̃̒͒̋̂̏̒̀̿͌͗̄͑̀̀͒̈̚͠͝ ȋ̸̧̛̭̠͈̰̰̦̹̥̜̖̈̂̀̽̿̋̊́̇̍̓̆̉̄̄̊͊̒̎͋̂̒̍̽̄͝ͅt̶̨̢̺̱̻̭̣͉͕̥͚̯͍̣͕͔̬̥͔̘̼͌̉̀̄̊̆͛̽̍̐̔̐̀̾̋̆͒̏̏̋͋̽͗̌͋͗.̸̧̨̧̡̢̪͙̦͙̝̜̦̞̳̤͖̟͍̮͖̘̙̳͉̳̲̲͉̠͎̽̍̓̒̅̿͂͑̎͊̋͒̈́̅̈́̆̽̒͛͐͛̉̀̈́̈̉̏̏̋̒͘͝͝͝ In the...

Nice recent addition to Gmail – a little warning if you’re replying to a thread you were BCC’ed on. Please note that I’m not necessarily endorsing the execution details, as I consider Gmail kind of a clunky operation overall. You can’t swat the message away with a swipe, the wrong quotation mark is used, and I’m...

Some time ago, I shared a video talking about games that leaned into their bugs and made them part of their lore. One not listed there, perhaps because it’s the most obvious example, is Pac-Man’s kill screen. A few weekends ago at an arcade game convention, I spotted something really interesting. It was an arcade...

1. Oh damn, you caught me in the middle of something. I was just trying to make a list of Windows versions for a friend – in Google Docs, of all things. Should be easy. I already grabbed this one off of Wikipedia and massaged it a bit, but it’s still kinda ugly: I don’t love the tight padding here. Let me try...

I spotted this kind of a keyboard shortcut pattern the other day. Here it is in Photoshop: Here it is in DevonThink: And here in Linear: Those “ordinal” keyboard shortcuts feel nice and orderly, and look so elegant, too. But beware! The moment you’ll want to introduce a new option, or even reorder the ones you have,...

For all these times we talked about Super Mario, we never covered another important game, Doom. Here’s a 17-minute video from decino explaining how the Doom monsters move and attack the player (the “AI” in the old sense of the word): What’s really fun about this video is how it uses annotated source code (in...

Speaking of user interface guidelines, developer Matt Sephton and others compiled many of Apple’s human interface guidelines, starting from 1980, all the way to 2014, including some goodies like early drafts, NeXT, Newton, and so on. Elsewhere, designer Geof Crowl put together his own list that goes broad instead of...

I like learning new things, and I like learning new old things. I was looking at Apple Human Interface Guidelines from 1987 and this passage caught my attention: The most common use of double-clicking is as a shortcut way to perform an action. For example, clicking twice on an icon is a faster way to open it than...

The Touch Bar arrived in 2016 seemingly already pre-doomed, on a generation of machines that had a “we’ve run out of ideas” smell all around them. The arrow keys were reshaped, the keyboard got a slimming down, and even the beloved MagSafe wasn’t, in fact, safe. All of these changes would prove unpopular and get...

Following (or, preceding) the previous post… 1. Old computers loved 8×8 fonts and they also loved 8×8 graphics. Since for many of those computers the graphics were displayed side by side without any gaps, the fonts had to waste a precious pixel or two to create some breathing room between the characters. But there...