If you’re a professional web app, your key shortcut situation is not to be envied. Once the operating system grabs the ⌘ shortcuts it requires (⌘M to minimize, ⌘H to hide, ⌘Q to quit, etc.), the browser has its turn, claiming everything from ⌘R, T, N, L, W for tab operation, to ⌘F, P, O, and S for other things. And...

Speaking of computers that used to stop running if you looked at them funny, a few years ago I wrote about the Monkey app that was there on the original Mac. Many software engineers will recognize the premise – Monkey was just a chaos script randomly pressing mouse buttons and keys during the night hours, and if the...

Contra the previous post, just spotted this “Same settings, new look!” callout in Firefox, on a page I have never visited before, talking about a feature I have never used: I mentioned this once – when you get someplace new, everything is new. This redesign announcement’s conditions were engineered poorly, because...

I wanted to show you a year’s worth of messages from my barber’s software, because this is what software should be. No spam, no upsells, no growth hacks, no unwelcome cuteness or puzzling verbosity. It’s so curt and straight to the point it should be set in a 1970s Helvetica: The appointment’s tomorrow. Any...

From Robin Sloan: Yet we should never forget that the product of work isn’t only the work — it’s also the worker. Doing the work changes you; the up-close expe­ri­ence trans­forms your capa­bil­i­ties and even your desires. Insights and ideas emerge from that interface, and I believe the agent mae­stros lose a lot —...

Tangentially related to the previous post, this 8-minute video from CrowBranch is a fun tier list of various ways games try to keep you in bounds: The limits here are I believe unrelated to precision, and rather to wanting to keep the player within a controlled, designed environment. (We once covered a story of this...

When you learn computer science, at some point you encounter floating-point numbers in all their peculiar glory. Floating-point numbers allow you to store values that are extremely huge or extremely tiny, but that comes with a strange price. The number is still just a number with a regular limited precision, but is...

I’ve enjoyed John Gruber’s posts about ads appearing on an increasing number of Apple surfaces: the App Store, Apple News, and – soon, perhaps – Apple Maps. (Just for reference, here’s an example of such an ad.) In a post earlier this week, Gruber likened ads to stickers on laptops, and shared a fun Steve Jobs...

An interesting short story from Ernie Smith at Tedium, who ventured out to do the opposite of what we usually cover on this blog – disrespect his motor memory: Recently, I made a realization: I have been unwillingly addicted to Facebook for a long time, and it’s not even because I like Facebook. Rather, it’s because...

Nice moment in Slack and Medium – when logging in, the login code that arrives via email is already there in the subject, in addition to hiding inside: This feels good for two reasons. One is the obvious one: you see the code earlier, it might show up in a notification, etc. But also, this should prevent multiple...

Over the years, I acquired this weird collection of almost-invisible, but important signifiers of when I know a product really focuses on craft and thinks about its users. I thought about one recently. Here’s what happens when you try to copy a long block of text from YouTube’s (otherwise very useful) text...

Julian Fong, a software engineer at Pixar, wrote a short thread on Mastodon with an interesting take I haven’t seen before: I still don’t use any AI code in my work, but I have to review more and more of it these days. One of the things bothering me about that these days is just how lacking in personality that code...