Here’s a big interactive essay I just finished. The theme: What does it take to build interfaces that truly allow for fast operation – and why that matters. If you like the interactive details posts here on Unsung, the essay is kind of a concentrated dose of all that. You can technically read it on the phone, but...

There are tons of small bugs around. Occasionally, there is a really big one. In the “oh my god, I can’t believe it” category, here’s a story of the game Yakuza 6. A few months ahead of launch, in February 2018, Sega released a free playable demo of the game. The demo gave access to the first level, and then blocked...

In iPhone’s accessibility settings you can choose the allowed speed of double- and triple-clicks on its side button (why is it important? we talked about it once), and the interface does something nice – after you make your choice, it shows the expected speed in the same place a sort of a preview: To be honest with...

You might have seen Bret Victor’s 55-minute Inventing On Principle talk soon after he gave it in 2012. If not, you should check it out. If you did, you should check it out again and see how it makes you feel today: It is about interactions but in the service of something grander, which (if I’m doing my job well) you...

I thought about this the other day, and I thought it’d be fun to share this internal tool I made over a decade ago to aid with exploring options for Medium’s typographical redesign. It’s called Fontificator. You can play with Fontificator here (desktop browsers only), or watch the likely confusing video below: The...

The software company Panic has a blog, and has had it since 2009. It has a clean, modern aesthetic that looks something like that: However, something interesting happens as you start going back in time by clicking Older Posts at the bottom – the historical posts are rendered using their original styling: This isn’t...

From the Animation Obsessive newsletter, a fun and nicely illustrated recounting of the way Jordan Mechner animated his seminal games Karateka and Prince of Persia. It’s rotoscoping, as everyone knows by now, but on a hard difficulty mode: Mechner’s setup for Karateka was wild. Over his Moviola screen, he taped thin...

This is a really nice set of transitions when pinching in and out in Photos in iOS 26. This is trickier than it seems, because it’s not just a linear zoom (like it would be in Maps or Sketch, for example). It’s a zoom and reflow – from 3 items to 1 item per column – which makes things a lot more complicated. Here...

Adam Engst at TidBits did the lord’s work of transforming the “sweating details” slide from WWDC26’s opening keynote… …into a nice, human-readable list of 264 items. It’s an impressive list that garnered universally positive reactions, but I have one observation: “Fast” and variants thereof appear on this list 59...

In game development, there is this strange effect known as “tunneling.” It happens when you do collision detection. Imagine a simple situation where every time you move a cube, you also test whether it touches the wall – and if it does, you make it bounce off of it. This works great, but if you move and detect the...

A quick post from Paul Kafasis at the software company Rogue Amoeba, talking about making update notifications less annoying: Though [the open source update framework] Sparkle serves us very well, it has one notable downside. Update announcements are most likely to appear at the least convenient time: right after...

I linked to a bunch of speedrunning videos before, but this 43-minute video by hbomberguy from 2018 is a good introduction to the whole concept and why people care: It’s really funny, romantic (maybe a bit too romantic), and it has a few great examples and explanations of the different kinds of speedruns that...