When I was at Medium, over a decade ago, I really enjoyed going deep on typography. People seemed to generally enjoy what we did. Writers really loved automatic em dashes and range dashes, discovered the beauty of hanging punctuation, and as funny as it might sound today, the smart quotes were a huge hit, too. I was...

From Jakub Krehel, a new blog post about self constraint in the era when AI makes it easy to ignore constraints altogether. My caveat is that the post doesn’t fully come together for me – jumping from AI to animations and then back to AI the way the author did does not feel cohesive. At the same time, in the middle...

Perhaps ironically given the subject matter, I found this 34-minute video by Razbuten a bit intense, but I would still recommend it to people who work on onboarding, settings, etc.: In the video, the author tries to answer the question: how to make any given game a challenge, given there is no universal standard of...

I like Angela Collier’s videos about physics and I was delighted to discover this 18-minute one… …because it’s a great continuation to the thread about the complexity of Microsoft Office I shared recently. Collier talks about why physicists prefer LaTeX to Word. LaTeX is sort of a nerdy HTML that predates HTML. It...

My arch nemesis lives only about 1.5 blocks away from me. It’s a coffee shop door. More specifically, it’s a sign on that door: This is what happens with embarrassing regularity: I am inside, about to step out, my brain reads PUSH from the other side – and so of course, like an idiot, I push the door instead of...

I know software updates can be exhausting these days; on top of regular weariness of things changing, there’s contentious stuff like Liquid Glass, or thoughtless AI integrations. So, I’m curious: What is a recent software update, anywhere, that made you happy? Something that made an app genuinely better for you, or...

John Gruber at Daring Fireball penned a short eulogy for Maestral: As of today Maestral continues to work just fine. I don’t know when these certificates are expiring. And I don’t know what I’m going to do when they do. Dropbox enshittified its app – my friend joked once that Dropbox is a rare example of a company...

I have never been particularly fond of “shake to undo” on the iPhone. It’s not a pleasant gesture to perform, I feel like typically I don’t have strong enough of a grip on my iPhone to invoke it without fear, and the gesture often undertriggers, requiring an even harder and more cumbersome shake, etc. etc. (One...

It’s Button Week here on Unsung, and here’s a 10-minute video by Jago Hazzard about the door opening/​closing buttons on London’s tube: We previously covered elevator buttons and the enduring myth that – at least in America – they are just “pacifiers,” disconnected from the elevator’s systems. The door opening and...

I have to admit that when a reader wrote to me and said… Every point release of BBEdit delights me. I live in BBEdit. It’s one of the few packages for which I read through the release notes every time (they often have spots of hilarity). …I got a bit concerned. One thing that I hate more than wasted release notes...

A truly fascinating 17-minute video where Chris Siebert at 100th Coin ventures out to play Super Mario in a way where every single byte of code and every single byte of graphics are used, and then shows his work: There was something about seeing the visualization of the entirety of the code being “used” that made me...

(This is a meta post about this very blog. If that’s not interesting to you, skip to the next one!) Here are some improvements I’ve made to Unsung in recent months. Always curious of your feedback or pointers to places that do these things better! Weekly emails I made it so clicking on every (non-YouTube) video or...