I am a huge fan of all sorts of “recent” features in software; I think they’re extremely helpful in removing tedium, and thoroughly undervalued. A lot of our work is repetitive, even if it’s sad to admit. I shared one example previously, and here’s five more. 1. My bank’s website not only shows me the last payment I...

I can finally update my ancient WarGames reference – turns out the computers on the TV show The Pitt are also preprogrammed to show the right things on the screen regardless of what the actors are actually typing. But you still need to flail your fingers in vaguely realistic ways, so the actors in this...

I want to tell you about something that might seem oddly specific and perhaps too technical, but a) at the end of it you will have a useful phrase somewhere in your brain that will pay off one day, and b) I swear I will make it worth your while. Have you ever seen this problem? The screenshot on the left is fine....

I moved Keyboard Maestro app to a different folder as it was running. I gather there must be some technical reason for the app to have to be power cycled, so I appreciated this warning, and the thoughtful bit of copywriting: “Continue” is caveated with “not recommended” so that you feel more comfortable choosing...

I have been working on an essay about how to gently get started and have fun with keyboard customization. I am finding myself surrounded by programmable keypads… …and I am going out of my way to try various new shortcuts and automations, big and small, just so I can write a helpful article. In Photoshop, one of the...

A good post by John Gruber on Daring Fireball investigating why apps pester you with the annoying “enjoying this app?” windows and attendant semi-shady practices (choose 5 stars and you get sent to App Store, but choose anything less, and your review will get redirected to Mr. Dev Null). The answer? They don’t...

A fun blog post from Alice Pellerin – if you can color code source code, why not try that for hex data? This pairs nicely with a previous post on Unsung in that it too actively investigates what makes for useful, not just “pretty” color coding.#coding #colors

Among many genuinely useful deeplinks you can use to control Raycast from afar in a simple way, I just spotted an interesting one: raycast://confetti This is what it does: Despite it being a confetti cannon and nothing more, I think it goes deeper than stuff like e.g. Asana’s “celebration creatures”, and it deserves...

Did you catch one interesting bit in the last post? The undo shortcut in Paint and other apps in Windows 1.0 used to be Shift+Esc: This reminded me that the classic Ctrl+Alt+Del shortcut was initially Ctrl+Alt+Esc. Except, people apparently invoked it a bit too often by accident, so it was split to require two hands...

Anyone using old computers for graphics remembers the strangeness of “flood fill”: The 1950s and 1960s computers were so sluggish that their consoles with blinking lights were not just for show; the operations were slow enough that you could still follow the lights in real time. This ceased to be true soon...

The classic – but still important – rule of web design says to avoid labeling links “click here.” It’s one of the oldest web design principles. Tim Berners-Lee wrote about it in 1992; if you visit this link right now, it might be the oldest page you will have ever visited. The gist of it is simple: the mechanics of...

My original idea for Unsung was “a microblog with ~3 posts a week,” which seems like a distant memory. Now that I published 250 posts since early December, what better way to celebrate than to ask for feedback? Do you enjoy specific kinds of content, or missing some topics? How could I make the visuals and...