MKBHD’s Waveform podcast (audio or video) sometimes has a fun “Did they even test this?” section. This week, for the first 12 minutes, the team was ranting about various volume controls – a meandering conversation that I also found just very enjoyable. The cited answer to “why do a lot of car volume controls max out...

I have been at times frustrated by cute placeholder text in places, most notably Dropbox Paper, which still puts them in a just-created doc… …and in new to-do items: This bothered me for two reasons. First was a potential tone mismatch. What if you are writing a layoffs announcement, a project cancellation doc, or...

Nice, clear, simple copy in ClarisWorks from 1997: No “Maybe later.” No “Not now.” Thirteen characters. Now, Later, Never. (Can’t help but notice that Esc and ⌘. – the classic Mac’s equivalent of Esc – still map to Later, however. Also, this breaks the rule of button copy being fully comprehensible without having to...

One of my favorite bits of trivia about the 1983 movie WarGames is that all the computer typing scenes have been faked in a clever way: The actors (many of whom might have never typed before, as home computers were only slowly becoming popular) were allowed to press any key they wanted, but the interface would still...

I know some of you are all whispering “he’s posting all of these hour-long YouTube videos, when am I supposed to find time to watch them”? I hear you loud and clear and I’m going to make it better… …by sharing this four-plus-hour long YouTube video by Jenny Nicholson from May 2024 – just so those other videos will...

There are fun things you can do in software when it is aware of the dimensions and features of its hardware. iPhone does a cute Siri animation that emanates precisely from the side button: A bunch of Android phones visualize the charge flowing to the phone from the USB port… …and even the whole concept of iPhone’s...

I enjoy little lists like these, and the presentation here is also delightful. From a design engineer Jakub Krehel, Details that make interfaces feel better. A few of these stood out to me: Make your animations interruptible. […] Users often change their intent mid-interaction. For example, a user may open a...

In my head, some bugs belong to categories that feel important, and yet remain hard to define and quantify: embarrassing bugs, dumb bugs, flow killers. Somewhere in the hard-to-explain space is another tricky category: UI decisions that feel cheap. The examples of cheapness that come to my mind readily will, I bet,...

Many of you have probably heard the repeated story of the first Moon landing in 1969 almost getting undone by a bunch of onboard computer glitches: There could not be a worse time in the flight to have computer problems. At, the time the press gleefully reported how Armstrong seized manual control from a crippled...

This iPhone UI for dark/​light theme is doing something clever: Ostensibly, there are two modes here: automatic, for when you want the theme to match the time of day manual, for when you want to keep one of the themes forever But check out what happens when I am in automatic mode, but toggle the theme by hand...

I just published a new photoessay about the history of the Fn key, and particularly what Apple has been doing with it recently. Do we need yet another person crashing out about Apple’s design decisions? Am I doing it only because it’s fashionable to be on Apple Design Hate Train these days? I’ll be honest: I don’t...

RuneScape is a popular MMORPG that reached its peak popularity in the late 2000s. In the game, combat – colloquially known as PvP, or player vs. player – is limited to a specific map area (called the Wilderness) and otherwise people’s houses. On 6/6/6 (sic!) a bug in RuneScape made it possible for a few players to...