A really well-produced 27-minute video from Super Splash Wave about 8-bit and 16-bit pixel art: What I liked about the video is that it doesn’t just revel in nostalgia, but goes deeper into some techniques and trends and details in the videogame graphics of the 1980s and the 1990s: palette limitations, palette...

A nice moment I spotted in Asana – you can quickly record your name pronunciation (the video below does not have sound): As someone who has “How to pronounce my name” in the footer of his website, it’s much appreciated! The result appears as a simple icon next to your name: For discoverability, if you spot this...

Safari broke tap to top for tabs (say it three times fast), and Bear added two-fingers gestures. Ivory – a Mastodon client for iOS – tries a different approach in a slightly different setting. The normal tap to top gesture works as expected, but tapping the top again returns you back where you were before: I believe...

I praised the note-taking app Bear before for its memory; the app would always remember your last-visited note and the precise place within it, even if it had every right to forget it. But there is a general problem here: memory that kicks in when not expected can be frustrating, as you have to undo its results and...

I just learned something fun this weekend. The seminal videogame Pong from 1972 looked like this: But there was a problem. Here’s Al Alcorn, the designer/​engineer of the machine: The paddles on the original Pong didn’t go all the way to the top. There was a defect in the [circuit] – I used a very simple circuit, I...

The task manager app Linear does something interesting I have not seen before. In the keyboard shortcut tooltips, it highlights the modifier keys you already pressed, to give you confirmation you’re on the right track: I think this is nice, particularly given that the modifier key situation is kind of a mess, and...

Something different for today: a one-hour episode of a podcast A Life Well Wasted from 2025. (I can’t link to it directly, but it’s the most recent episode, called “Game Over.”) It’s a human story whose beats might be familiar to some of you: a long software project that ultimately failed despite the enormous...

I am generally not a fan of typewritten art, because at some point it all starts to feel a bit same’y, and the gimmick of using a typewriter as a paintbrush wears off pretty quickly. But these drawings by German artist Arno Beck caught my attention, because it feels like they playfully remix three eras: overtyping...

Robin Sloan: I still use Sublime Text for all of my programming and all of my newsletter-ing. […] The app is simple and superfast; I have it set up exactly the way I like it […], and it’s difficult for me to imagine ever switching to anything else. Here is a piece of software as sturdy and obedient as a cast-iron...

iPhone’s home button and then the swipe up home gesture are so important and well done that they probably need to be covered as Unsung Heroes, but I wanted to mention something else today as we’re revisiting the whole “app icons in squircles” story (my most recent post + Louie Mantia’s post). The first iPhone in...

Some years ago, the inimitable channel Technology Connections posted a 17-minute video about the peculiar design quirk of ceiling and room fans – they usually order their options Off → High → Medium → Low rather than the more natural Off → Low → Medium → High. The video is a bit off topic for this channel, but check...

The post about the dark mode toggle reminded me of two similar things rattling in my brain. On the positive side, here’s a delightful interaction from macOS. I can easily maximize the window to take up half the screen, but the moment I start dragging it, it recalls and nicely restores itself to its original size:...