In early 2023, Dan Olson at Folding Ideas made a scathing, smart, almost two-hour-long video essay about Decentraland, the metaverse that was one of the poster children of the web3 era: Most of what Decentraland does, and what it fails to do, are things that would be considered forgivable or quaint in a Kickstarter...

Here’s a nice moment in Logic Pro, a music app. Like with most such apps, you can press R to record playing an instrument. However, if you forgot to start recording, or were just goofing around and stumbled upon something wonderful, you can press ⇧R and the recording will appear anyway, as if you had a time machine....

A fun 16-minute video from PortalRunner with this premise: This is an image file, containing a picture of my cat. But if I rename it to .MP4, it becomes a video file – also of my cat. If rename to .PDF, it becomes a text document containing the script for this video. It can also be a valid webpage, a .ZIP archive,...

I got pissed at Chrome the other day. This is not the first user-hostile thing Chrome did – off the top of my head, I remember the updater fiasco from some years ago, and the more recent auto-installation of a 4GB file – but as you’ll see, this one is squarely in my wheelhouse. The transgression: Chrome took over a...

A computer science professor Paul Cantrell, on Mastodon: Creative work keeps taking roughly the same amount of human labor / attention / care, even as new technologies accelerate or remove things that used to take time. This is because creativity is fundamentally not an efficiency problem; process is not just the...

Around the time I was writing about iPhone’s Safari breaking the expected “tap to jump to the top” gesture, a conversation on social media pointed to yet another thing that this tab control does strangely. A typical use of Safari means two groups of sites: a regular set on the right, and “private” pages on the left...

A fun 19-minute video from commonLuke trying to write a short Fibonacci program in increasingly esoteric languages: Here are the languages: Python, Scratch, and assembly (as control), LOLCODE, a language resembling lolcat memes of yore, Piet, a language whose output looks like Piet Mondrian’s abstract art,...

As a teenager I adored Norton Commander, learned some UI magic from early videogames, and dreamed of a Mac my family couldn’t afford. But I think the first product that taught me something truly memorable in terms of user experience was, of all things, Excel 97. Excel 97 cooked. It was rendered in brand-new,...

Let’s Game It Out is a YouTube channel where Josh Knoles occasionally grabs a modern videogame and tries to play it in a particularly creative way – finding bugs, breaking things, doing an action more times than anyone thought possible. What makes it even more fun is that what’s tested often are early access,...

Bear (a notetaking tool) has simple image resizing, with one extra nicety – if your images are near each other, resizing one will snap to the width of the other: In the Finder, columns snap to the width necessary to keep all the names untruncated – and not one pixel more: (Sidebar: This is also the only place I’m...

Earlier this month, I talked about a rotation button in photos that behaved really nicely in iOS, and not so great on the Nothing Phone. Here’s a story of a similar fumble iOS once made that might bring the point home even more. The calculator app has been preinstalled on iPhones ever since their debut in 2007. For...

When you visit parts of the website of the Driver & Vehicle Licensing Agency in the U.K. outside of standard office hours, you will see this: It seems ridiculous, almost like the famous 500-mile email bug, but Dafydd Vaughan explains how it came to be. It won’t be a surprise that the story starts with an old...