From The Verge: Apple has developed an unexpected workaround to prevent the iPhone 18 Pro Max from being hit by shipping restrictions on big batteries. There’s a “battery-firmware solution” in place on the new iPhones, according to Apple’s support page, which keeps capacity below the 20Wh limit for single-cell...

In 1996, Street Fighter Alpha 2 was ported onto Super Nintendo Entertainment System, a 1990 machine on its way out and not really up to the task of running such a modern game. The team put up a hell of a job, involving adding a custom compression chip, with the game being much better than anyone expected – but still...

Here are a few nice and interesting design decisions I spotted on various websites in the last months. The pinball repair forum Pinside shows specifically how much time has passed between posts. This is great for orientation and especially when catching up or revisiting – history always gets flattened, and this...

Designer Reimar Servas goes further than the usual Border Radius Discourse and thinks about the deeper but often ignored questions of border radii as a system, and about the consequences of such a system that go beyond visuals: […] These redesign efforts suggest ignorance of a fundamental problem: rounded forms have...

A fun lil convention from the financial app YNAB’s release notes page – there is always a headlining feature with a hero shot and a long description, but the smaller improvements are still listed as “pocket change”: #release notes

Just as there is a ticking bomb built into cut/⌘X – if you cut something, and then cut something else again without a paste in between, you overwrite the clipboard without any way to bring it back – there is another one that awaits you when you use undo/⌘Z. Here’s a typical undo chain, illustrated using Photoshop’s...

Completely unrelated to software, but sometimes stepping outside is what’s needed to develop perspective and find creative solutions – this is Practical Engineering’s video about the many electrical plugs and sockets in America: There are a lot more socket kinds than I expected, and sprinkled in between are some...

In a recent post, Jim Nielsen used the term “bulldozing of an interface”: I’ve found this to be true a lot as of late. Lots of tiny details that were meticulously crafted over years with specific rationales tied to real-world use cases, all completely bulldozed in a giant refactor. I liked that term and description,...

The relationship between keyboard manufacturers and standards bodies in various countries is so complex I barely understand a snippet of it. The most famous example must be the 1990s PowerBooks, which had a beige variant for Germany and Germany only, to conform with local laws that prescribed and enforced specific...

Inspired by a conversation with a friend, I made a mini site that’s an interactive representation of my design bookshelves: I am hoping it becomes a fun reference to browse, or something just enjoyable to play with. I made the interface feel very differently on desktop and mobile, and I hope both are fun. (There’s...

Make Some Noise is one of many fantastic improv comedy shows on Dropout. I noticed one of the ongoing themes is “tech gone bad,” so I compiled a short list below. I just find these really funny. Video call with shitty wifi: Logging in with 30-factor authentication: A cutscene in a video game that’s glitching out: In...

A big screen carries with it different UI expectations, and how that manifests itself in Apple TV’s Settings app, is that there’s always room for an additional hint about the thing you’ve just selected. So yes, I have been exploring Apple TV’s Settings after the recent update like any normal person would, and I have...