I’ve learned recently that “rubber banding” can mean at least three different things in the context of UI/UX design: whatever happens at the edges of your scroll container when you’re using elastic scrolling, which started on the first iPhone and have spread more widely since in videogames, balancing the difficulty...

I saw this fly by before, but just today I learned that Pride versioning is a tiny project by Nikita Prokopov, whose work I shared before: The author says: This is a parody and a homage to the awesome Semantic Versioning. …but I think it stands on its own. You can’t have craft without being at peace with pride and...

I mentioned VisiCalc not long ago and Lotus 1-2-3 just this week. Yesterday, a new issue of Stone Tools came out, nicely tying the story together. Stone Tools is a project by Christopher Drum where he grabs old productivityapps, spools up the correct emulator, and writes a review from today’s perspective. I like the...

⌘T is a very important shortcut in Slack. It allows you to quickly talk to someone just by typing in their name. I use it probably dozens, if not hundreds of times a day. ⌘T is right next to ⌘R, which reloads Slack. Occasionally, on the way to ⌘T, my fingers graze ⌘R. Fingers being fingers, I immediately realize...

This video from Marblr about adding fall damage to Overwatch is really intense – 45 minutes of length and a lot of footage of frantic gameplay – but really informative, too. It’s a great case study of how something seemingly really simple – deducting health from the player as they fall from height – can be a...

It’s hard to imagine it now, but during iPhone’s first year, no emoji were available at all. It took four years until 2011’s iOS 5 gave everyone an emoji keyboard. But in between 2008 and 2011, there existed a peculiar interregnum where emoji were only available on Japanese iPhones. The situation had to be carefully...

I just stumbled upon a nice little power-user innovation in Chrome’s Web Inspector. In Safari, and previously in Chrome, when editing CSS properties, you’d get a usual editing typeahead for the property name, and then the same on the other side for the property value. In newer versions of Chrome, the typeahead menu...

I know we’re probably collectively a bit tired talking about macOS Tahoe, but I just noticed something that I think is a good example of how small details can ladder up to bigger things. This is macOS Sequoia (the pre-Tahoe release) and a typical pop-up button: One clever thing macOS has been doing since basically...

The year is 1981. Your IBM PC is equipped with a tragic speaker that sounds awful for anything except occasional beeps. (Those beeps sound awful, too.) You can’t afford a sound card and besides, sound cards for your PC have not been invented yet. You can’t even afford a floppy drive, so you’re one of the rare people...

This blog is about craft, but sometimes the answer to craft is not skill or taste or awareness or effort, but it’s creating conditions for craft to flourish. Workday looks like Workday, and your banking app looks like your banking app, not because there aren’t enough designers and engineers around that know how to...

One of the most mysterious keys on the PC keyboard has always been Scroll Lock, joining Caps Lock and Num Lock to create the instantly recognizable LED triumvirate: Scroll Lock was reportedly specifically added for spreadsheets, and it solved a very specific problem: before mice and trackpads, and before fast...

I realized recently that I conflated two similar user-interface comedy skits. This one is from Sean Wing from 2023: And this older one is from Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, from 2009: Speaking of Tim and Eric, this one was also funny and ostensibly on topic for this blog! (And re: previous post – I had to...