The biggest smallest GUI design schism between Apple’s platforms and Windows isn’t the black vs. white cursor or where to put the menu bar. It’s the presentation of keyboard shortcuts. On a Mac, the shortcuts are iconographic. Command is ⌘. Option is ⌥. Shift is ⇧. Control is ⌃. Fn is 🌐. There are also icons for all...

Do you remember the video I once shared about making a song in Strudel? I recently stumbled upon this 20-minute YouTube video by iSongs of someone recreating Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” in GarageBand on their iPhone: Like the previous video, I believe this is so tight as it was previously rehearsed/​prepared, which...

I generally avoid think pieces about AI because a) a lot of them are boring, and b) they rarely match the pragmatic posture of this blog. But this essay on a new No One’s Happy blog was really interesting to read, and feels different in a few ways. First, it examines what happens as AI slop spreads in the context...

The Ringer journalist Brian Phillips asked on Bluesky: I’m working on a column about the tech annoyances that drive us crazy, and I want it to be as universal as possible, so tell me yours! E.g. scanning a QR code to read a menu, never receiving the one-time passcode they supposedly texted you, “verify you’re human”...

Actors are overwhelmingly diurnal, overtime is expensive, and film emulsion struggles with limited light, so since the dawn of time Hollywood has been using a technique called “day for night” – shooting during daylight, and then darkening and blue-tinting in post to pretend it was night time all along: It’s a method...

This 22-minute video by Karl Jobst describes a pretty wild discovery of a glitch called Crystal Storage Glitch, allowing to skip a certain level for much faster completion times in Mega Man X2: I won’t spoil the glitch because it’s a fascinating combination of a corner case, a race condition, and even a dose of dumb...

In Figma, when choosing a font, you can filter down a list of fonts from “all” to specific categories or e.g. only fonts present in the current file. But when you type into the search field, the search cuts across all fonts again, ignoring the applied filter. The search effectively lives outside the filter. In...

Andrew Gleeson designed Analog Mono, “fixing the crimes of VCR OSD Mono.” There used to be this classic pixel font that you’d see everywhere in the 1990s on hi-fi equipment: VCRs, TVs, camcorders, etc. One of its challenges was a low baseline which resulted in all the letters with descenders pulled up, for example:...

A nice, but unpolished onboarding callout directing people towards a more useful shortcut, in Google Docs. I’m holding arrow keys without ⇧ here first, then with ⇧: To improve it, I would add some sort of small celebratory “completed!” state, and auto-hide it afterwards; right now, it seems that it hides on a delay,...

Here’s a 2002 story from a younger internet, by programmer Trey Harris (link to the original and if you don’t like the classic Usenet formatting – my browser’s reader mode can’t even prettify it! – here’s a nicer-looking format): “We’re having a problem sending email out of the department.” “What’s the problem?” I...

A delightful 24-minute video from ToffeeBun about sampling in videogame music and how it changed over the years: The video helped me understand the difference between tunes purely synthesized from soundchips, those sequenced with samples (e.g. MIDI or sound trackers), and those that are completely “streamed” (e.g....

I love looking at origins of obvious things, because of two things: They help me get unstuck. If you go far enough, you will find out that even the most ossified conventions that are older than you haven’t always been this way. They put me in the mood of “what of the things that feel normal today that deserve to...