An excellent 17-minute video from The Art Of Storytelling that analyzes the now-infamous 2021 Mark Zuckerberg Metaverse introduction video: What I liked about it is that the author goes beyond cheap shots and deeper into both storytelling aspects (drawing from his experience)… Now, as you can tell, the big problem...

Connecting to public wi-fi networks with their captive portals is always a bit of a wonky proposition, and nothing makes public wi-fi wonkier than using it on a plane. I believe that the resurgence of https made things harder – if the captive portal doesn’t kick in, no secure traffic can happen – and over time I...

Not long ago, a blog I otherwise like a lot included this passage: Designers have been saying this for years. Cameras don’t take pictures, photographers do. Tools don’t make you a better designer. Now the PM world is arriving at the same conclusion. I am not linking to the post because I hear this argument from time...

Software engineering has long had a concept of “premature optimization” – overbuilding things too early in anticipation of future that might or might not come. I feel design has a version of that, too. Here’s viewer menu hierarchy in Google Drive: One should always feel very uneasy about a menu with just one item,...

I occasionally move older writing that still feels interesting to my new site, and today I republished the 2015 story about a strange bug that brought back an old pixel font from beyond the grave: Some of the technical details inside are obsolete, but the story might still be fun. (Plus, it seems like at every job I...

I mentioned placeholders before in the context of Dropbox Paper… …and I wanted to share a response by Nikita Prokopov, because he had a great point about those Dropbox Paper placeholders that I didn’t consider: For me it’s […] confusing placement. Like if somebody writes “Have a nice day” on a door instead of “Push”...

A meandering and messy, but otherwise an absolutely worthwhile essay from Shubham Bose about the bloat and hostile behaviours on news sites: I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data. […] Almost all modern news websites are guilty of...

I feel like social media and recently the slate of AI-powered “tell me what’s here” features continue to show us the power and longevity of screenshots. After all, nothing beats a more or less approachable shortcut and a file format that works literally everywhere. But screenshots have issues, and I liked how Bear...

To be fair, I am traveling and haven’t looked for solid evidence or citation that this works for people, but I personally like this approach: in lieu of a separate language selector button, each option here itself is both a language selector and a commit button. The labels themselves are not the name of the...

Speaking of fly-by-wire… William Langewiesche is one of my favourite technical writers. He finds a way to explain complex aviation aspects really well, and then add a certain amount of beauty and poetry on top of that. His style was a big influence on my book, and I like him so much I once compiled links to his...

This 9-minute video from PetaPixel probably won’t make much sense for non-photographers, but there is something refreshing about this idea that there are still places where adding software is seen as positive: The video talks about Tamron’s lenses which have their own software (independent of the camera), and even...

It is common knowledge that Luigi is just a palette-swapped Mario, and that the characters facing left are the same characters as those facing right, only rendered mirrored. This interesting 9-minute video from Core-A Gaming explains how this can be kind of tricky for fighting games in particular: Suddenly, a...