First of all, correction for part 1 – the “focus mode” wasn’t removed. It was renamed to “quiet mode” and relocated to a different part of the UI, and I failed to spot it there. It’s still slightly perplexing, shiftily capitalized, and I doubt fully effective, but the effort is there: I also want to warn you there...

(This is a meta post about this very blog. If that’s not interesting to you, skip to the next one!) Thank you for all your feedback and bug reports in response to my call two weeks ago. Since then, I: revamped the image and video pipelines, which should make the blog load a lot faster and CPU/GPU struggle a lot...

★★★☆☆ Decades ago, I used to work for a videogame magazine, but those days are long gone, and any videogame I play is a rare and intentional event. Shadow Of The Colossus, the 2005 title directed by Fumito Ueda, felt so important to get to know that I had to borrow a PlayStation in order to play it, instead of...

4096 is a Russian UI artist (I just made up that title) who creates interesting audio-visual mashups. Here are some of the best ones: Interfaces of rhythm games (like Guitar Hero): Windows startup sounds, incl. fun hi-def reimagining of their splash screens: Windows error messages: If this looks like fun, check out...

Before dark mode became mainstream in the late 2010s, there were two main customers of dark UI themes: programming and photo/​video production. But, to the best of my knowledge, they arrived at that preference from two very different angles. Programmers’ fondness for dark mode was a result of decades of bad display...

To follow up from yesterday’s post, in Figma, object selection actually goes onto the undo stack. This is because in a professional tool with objects in multiple levels of hierarchy, it might take a while to construct a selection to work on – and since selection is always just one accidental click away from being...

A fun bit of storytelling on the website for a git client Retcon: I don’t have personal experience with Retcon. I definitely struggled a lot with git’s syntax over the years, and have my own cheatsheet that looks similar to this. But what I really liked from this page was the elevation of undo to be the North Star....

Minecraft is so complex that it’s sometimes hard to know what is a bug and what is not. Here’s the logic of the game: If you fall from height, you receive fall damage. If you fall from height but you’re in a boat, there’s no fall damage. If you fall from height and you’re in a boat, but you fall from a distance of...

There’s a category of “plain text” or “ASCII” diagramming and UI design tools: Mockdown – works immediately on the web, even on mobile Wiretext – works on the web, but desktop only Monodraw – a Mac app I believe these are used by people who prefer intentionally limited visual choices, for low-key diagramming to put...

If there was one go-to example of an impenetrable error message in the 1980s, it must have been this – popping up, for example, if your disk drive was dirty: On some technical level, the options made sense: “Abort” would stop whatever you were doing, “Retry” would try to repeat the action, and “Ignore” would proceed...

An interesting 10-minute video from gruz about Super Mario Bros. Remastered, a modern Super Mario fan remake with surprising depth that puts Nintendo’s own efforts to shame: What I liked about it is that it’s wrestling with the idea “How do you improve on something considered perfect?” and touches upon the important...

An interesting flavour of a molly guard that can only happen in onscreen interfaces is “occasionally moving things out of the way to mess with the user.” The messing-with-the-user part is, ostensibly, for their benefit. Making something not appear in the usual position, or not behave the usual way, becomes a speed...