Nikita Prokopov on his fun Tumblr-like site Grumpy Website that collects UI transgressions with light commentary: Why log in when you have to, when you can instead experience the same Kafkaesque maze of pages, redirects, confirmation emails, copying codes, and searching for a second device—all a week in advance? I...

Have you head of the Swiss Cheese model? You see it sometimes in descriptions of how complex systems fail. The visual usually goes like this: The whole idea is: even if you have multiple layers of safety – like many slices of cheese – there are always holes in each slice. Typically, a hole in any slice is covered by...

I am generally not someone who cares much for easter eggs (unless they come with interesting stories), but John Gruber’s one-liner made me pause for an unexpected reason: Joanna Stern explains why this emoji is correct today: 📅. (This one too: 📆) I thought the two different calendars was some trickery, but the...

On Mastodon, Alex Russell, a product architect who’s worked on Chrome and Edge, and has focused on tech standards for a while: Once Upon A Time At Google, a team presented results that had confounded them: making the system load several times faster increased engagement somewhat, but in line with Tammy’s findings,...

Thank you to everyone who answered the call for good software updates from last week. I received so many nominations that the list below is severely narrowed down, but I appreciated every response! I grouped the answers in sections I saw emerge organically, I included links to apps, and did some light editing for...

In this 7-minute video, kaptainkristian talks about the fascinating process of making Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the pre-CGI hybrid animation/​live action movie from 1988: This is called “bumping the lamp” – a phrase coined by Disney during the production of Roger Rabbit to describe going above and beyond what was...

If you want to record the screen from your iPhone on your Mac, open the QuickTime Player app but ignore New Screen Recording, and click on New Movie Recording instead. This instruction is a fever dream of three weird things in sequence: What on earth is “QuickTime”? I am recording with a player? Why can’t I choose...

This is a design joke that always makes me laugh: This was made by… someone, a while back, I believe in response to the Twitter logo redesign of 2012, which showed the new logomark as composed of exclusively circles: Now, to be clear: that Twitter logo redesign was gorgeous, and I do not particularly care if it was...

Immich is a self-hosted photo/​video app, and one of their side pages is Cursed Knowledge: Cursed knowledge we have learned as a result of building Immich that we wish we never knew. There is something about this format that I really enjoyed as a reflection but also as a way to share with others – simple one...

Over on Bluesky, Melanie Walsh asks: Favorite and least favorite file formats? I’ll start. Favorite: TXT Least favorite: HEIC The answers – both replies and quote posts – are really interesting because most of the time they’re not about inherent capabilities of each format, but: how well supported it is in the...

I’m endlessly confounded (as a user) and fascinated (as a designer) when it comes the shortcut conventions in Google’s professional web apps. They seem… bad, but bad in a strange, inexplicable, enthralling way. Previously, we encountered this: The lessons there were, primarily: don’t… do this, and also maybe don’t...

Somewhere next to optimistic loading and optimistic saving exists another technique to make apps feel faster: optimistic committing. Flickr is a great example. After navigating to photo upload, you enter a sort of a foyer where you can drag in the photos, reorder them, name and tag them, and otherwise prepare them...