For all these times we talked about Super Mario, we never covered another important game, Doom. Here’s a 17-minute video from decino explaining how the Doom monsters move and attack the player (the “AI” in the old sense of the word): What’s really fun about this video is how it uses annotated source code (in...

Speaking of user interface guidelines, developer Matt Sephton and others compiled many of Apple’s human interface guidelines, starting from 1980, all the way to 2014, including some goodies like early drafts, NeXT, Newton, and so on. Elsewhere, designer Geof Crowl put together his own list that goes broad instead of...

I like learning new things, and I like learning new old things. I was looking at Apple Human Interface Guidelines from 1987 and this passage caught my attention: The most common use of double-clicking is as a shortcut way to perform an action. For example, clicking twice on an icon is a faster way to open it than...

The Touch Bar arrived in 2016 seemingly already pre-doomed, on a generation of machines that had a “we’ve run out of ideas” smell all around them. The arrow keys were reshaped, the keyboard got a slimming down, and even the beloved MagSafe wasn’t, in fact, safe. All of these changes would prove unpopular and get...

Following (or, preceding) the previous post… 1. Old computers loved 8×8 fonts and they also loved 8×8 graphics. Since for many of those computers the graphics were displayed side by side without any gaps, the fonts had to waste a precious pixel or two to create some breathing room between the characters. But there...

A really well-produced 27-minute video from Super Splash Wave about 8-bit and 16-bit pixel art: What I liked about the video is that it doesn’t just revel in nostalgia, but goes deeper into some techniques and trends and details in the videogame graphics of the 1980s and the 1990s: palette limitations, palette...

A nice moment I spotted in Asana – you can quickly record your name pronunciation (the video below does not have sound): As someone who has “How to pronounce my name” in the footer of his website, it’s much appreciated! The result appears as a simple icon next to your name: For discoverability, if you spot this...

Safari broke tap to top for tabs (say it three times fast), and Bear added two-fingers gestures. Ivory – a Mastodon client for iOS – tries a different approach in a slightly different setting. The normal tap to top gesture works as expected, but tapping the top again returns you back where you were before: I believe...

I praised the note-taking app Bear before for its memory; the app would always remember your last-visited note and the precise place within it, even if it had every right to forget it. But there is a general problem here: memory that kicks in when not expected can be frustrating, as you have to undo its results and...

I just learned something fun this weekend. The seminal videogame Pong from 1972 looked like this: But there was a problem. Here’s Al Alcorn, the designer/​engineer of the machine: The paddles on the original Pong didn’t go all the way to the top. There was a defect in the [circuit] – I used a very simple circuit, I...

The task manager app Linear does something interesting I have not seen before. In the keyboard shortcut tooltips, it highlights the modifier keys you already pressed, to give you confirmation you’re on the right track: I think this is nice, particularly given that the modifier key situation is kind of a mess, and...

Something different for today: a one-hour episode of a podcast A Life Well Wasted from 2025. (I can’t link to it directly, but it’s the most recent episode, called “Game Over.”) It’s a human story whose beats might be familiar to some of you: a long software project that ultimately failed despite the enormous...