Two nice follow-ups to topics we covered before. In February, Nobert Heger did some analysis of precisely which pixels in Tahoe are intercepted by mouse when trying to resize a window. In April, Steve Ruiz, author of tldraw, did this more extensively for all the drawing apps like Canva, Figma, Illustrator, and so...

Ever since I wrote a post about the molly guard, I have been on the lookout for those, and I think I collected enough to do a little follow-up. First, some classic industrial molly guards from a museum in Germany: This IBM electronic typewriter had a gorgeous perspex molly guard around the power button: Other...

In 2021 and 2022, product manager Steven Sinofsky wrote a… …first-person account of what I saw at the PC revolution from the perspective of joining Microsoft as a newly hired software design engineer fresh from graduate school working on developer tools, through my time as a program manager and ultimately leading...

This is not italics. This is not even oblique. This is a side effect of how those displays work. Instead of a whole rectangle of pixels being changed at once, the display is updated line by line, starting from the top one. As it’s moving towards the bottom, the internal horizontal position might have already...

Interactive explainers are one of my favourite things about the web: people passionate about things introduce them to others, for free, with care, and often using some interesting interactive or educational approaches in the process. I picked a few I particularly liked for this post. These aren’t just explaining...

The otherwise excellent note-taking app Bear has an interesting bug that’s worth talking about while it’s still here. When you’re around to-do items, you can press ⌘. (period) to toggle any task complete or incomplete. It’s actually a really fun shortcut in practice: But when you have a larger selection with a mixed...

I hate lorem ipsum with passion, but guess what? There’s more intentionality in it than I assumed, and even easter eggs, as this fun 25-minute mini documentary from Emily Zhang/​Rabbit Hole shows: You can tell that this was not the work of an amateur. The garbled text is done with a lot of care and knowledge. You...

In last week’s post, I made an off-hand comment about Vercel’s Geist Pixel announcement, and I thought it might be interesting to turn this into more of a full-fledged critique. I don’t think it’s a good announcement, but its flaws are pretty universal, so I want to put words to these flaws. This will extend to a...

A nice moment in Google Maps – if you are travelling by public transit, an indicator shows not just the current stop on the list in real time, but also exactly where you are in between stops: It’s not just something traditionally delightful, a cute big icon moving smoothly. I also think it’s very helpful. Travelling...

I know I just mentioned the Google Search app, but I’m also in the process of disentangling myself from Google and Gmail after last week’s Google I/O revelations. On that note, this is an interesting, meandering essay by Ernie Smith at Tedium, reflecting on the enshittification of Google and the two-year anniversary...

Do you know those “Are you still here” screens? In some cases – like banking – they are ostensibly there to improve security. In public transit ticket or similar machines, on the other hand, they exist just so the machine can easily reset itself ahead of a future customer. Resetting to default state happens on your...

I absolutely love Jimmy Maher’s body of work. He’s been writing about older games and software in general since 2011; it’s always solid, always an enjoyable read, and always providing new perspectives even on stuff I thought I knew well. (Maher also goes by The Digital Antiquarian.) I linked to his work once before,...