I know, I know. I’m supposed to say iPod’s click wheel, or the Western Electric 500 rotary dial, or maybe the first Nest. But, have you ever played Super Sprint? It was Super Sprint that had the first amazing rotary controller I’ve ever used, and the whole cabinet design told you the game was very well aware of...

A few nice moments that caught my attention in Marek Minor’s case study of designing icons for Cursor. The diagonals for “cancel/​wrong” icons are always backslashes, and all the “positive” icons are always slashes: There is a system that provides 1-to-1-and-only-1 mapping between a concept and an icon: The point of...

Ivory is a Mastodon client, and their account switcher has a few interesting mechanics. The standard one is that you can tap on your avatar, and get a menu in response: But you can also drag down on the avatar, and get a different reaction: This, I believe, is meant to be a slightly faster way. The settings option...

Many years ago, I put together a quick proposal of what I called “responsive text” for social proof: I think you get the idea – instead of dumb truncation, the underlying code could prepare a few strings conveying the information with different levels of specificity, and then the UI could choose the longest one that...

An interesting take from a screen annotation app ScreenBrush – instead of a standard “don’t show again” checkbox modifying a button, it shows two buttons as a fork in a road: I am not sure I have ever seen it laid out like this before, and I am not sure if it’s good, as it does force a user to make a choice where a...

A nice moment in iOS – even if you delete an app, you might still be on the hook for its subscription, so the operating system shows this right after deletion: (Context for the screenshot: I’m only uninstalling Quiche Browser to reinstall it and get back to the pristine onboarding for the previous post.)#got your...

(This is a meta post about this very blog. If that’s not interesting to you, skip to the next one!) A few people recently asked about my writing and publication process, so this post is for anyone who’s interested in that. The process My present goal is posting every day, and at least eleven posts a week. This is...

(This is a meta post about this very blog. If that’s not interesting to you, skip to the next one!) 1. Clicking or tapping on Newsletter or About links just above reveals the options in small drawers underneath, hopefully making it easier to engage without having to deal with new page opening, and so on: 2. You can...

Unless you’re reading via RSS, welcome to Unsung’s new livery! I dreaded even attempting the redesign, but as I was adding full-text search to the blog, I realized the previous simple frame couldn’t accommodate it – no matter what I did, the search felt bolted on. I suppressed my PM side, decided to scope creep, and...

Speaking of cut in File Explorer, Will McGugan, creator of the writing editor Ishmael, proposes doing the same thing for text editing – that is, leaving ghost text behind: I call it “Ghost Cut”, and it works like this: pressing Ctrl+X fades the selected text and makes it inert—you can’t click on the cut text and the...

Dragging and dropping files with your mouse in the Finder is nice, but there are many moments you wanna reach for the keyboard instead. Finder supports that. You dragged the file to a wrong place by accident? ⌘Z can undo it in a jiffy. You already have the right windows open? ⌘C and ⌘V can start a copy faster than...

Phones grow big and their top edges inch closer and closer toward the horizon. Over time, iOS and apps moved some of the important surfaces to the bottom (for better or worse – I still struggle with seeing results and completions appearing above inputs), and the well-designed Reachability gesture helps, too. Still,...