I was impressed with this clever internal interface at Linear, shown inside this larger blog post: The dev toolbar exists directly inside the app and allows us to easily toggle feature flags on and off. When something didn’t look right in the refreshed UI, it took us just one click to compare it with the previous...

This 25-minute segment on MKBHD’s Waveform podcast (video or audio, segment starts at 40:21) is from November 2024, and is a nice counterpart to the post about favourite well-made apps and sites. The original theme is “what is an app that you use all the time, and like to use, but is actually a bad app?” but it...

A few years ago, I suggested adding a new interaction to Figma. If your text cursor was on a misspelled word (anywhere inside, or the edges), you could press Tab to quickly accept the suggested correction, without even seeing it: Independently, Google Docs approached it from a slightly different angle, but landing...

#easter eggs #humor

Go to Settings > Accessibility > Zoom, and then turn on “Use scroll gesture with modifier keys to zoom.” Then, at any moment, you can hold Control and swipe with two fingers (or use a scroll wheel) up or down to zoom the entire screen. I’d also recommend turning off “Smooth images” under “Advanced…” so you see...

★★☆☆☆ The new book by Stewart Brand is tackling a subject that’s important to me. The introduction struck a chord: The apparent paradox is profound: Maintenance is absolutely necessary and maintenance is optional. It is easy to put off, yet it has to be done. Defer now, regret later. Neglect kills. What to do?...

This is a thoughtful post from Florian Schulz about designing a typeahead experience. I liked the details both within the implementation – for example, making sure the kerning is preserved! – but also in the presentation. I particularly enjoyed Schulz making the component demo itself, rather than using prerecorded...

Multibowl is one of my favourite emulation projects because it’s a rare example of using emulators creatively, rather than for nostalgia or research. It’s a 2016 game by Bennett Foddy and AP Thompson that reimagines older existing games as smaller pieces of a new, Super Mario Party-like experience. Two players...

The story about the original Macintosh’s built-in font set being named after “world-class cities” is well known and documented by Susan Kare on the Folklore site: The first Macintosh font was designed to be a bold system font with no jagged diagonals, and was originally called “Elefont”. There were going to be lots...

In the Fallout 3: Broken Steel addition, the team wanted to introduce a moving subway train under Washington, D.C.: However, the engine did not have any moving vehicles. Instead of adding a new kind of primitive into the game engine, the creators… made the player character itself become the subway car when in...

A thoughtful 26-minute talk by Imani Joy, the solitary full-time designer on Mastodon, reflecting on her nine months there: It’s an interesting peek behind the curtain at designing for this particular space, and the many unenviable constraints: lack of data, care for privacy, tension between Mastodon’s power-user...

Column view cut its teeth on NeXT computers… …and blossomed on early versions of Mac OS X… …but where I thought it really shone was the first iPods: This was perhaps the most fun you could ever have navigating a hierarchy of things; it made sense what left/​right/up/​down meant in this universe, to a point you could...