From Nilay Patel, a recommendation for the best printer of 2023: Here’s the best printer in 2023: the Brother laser printer that everyone has. Stop thinking about it and just buy one. It will be fine! The Brother whatever-it-is will print return labels for online shopping, never run out of toner, and generally be a...

The last post about the Nothing Phone not buffering its button presses reminded me of something. Here’s IBM Selectric, a 1961 typewriter: Past decades get compressed into a singular point in time, so we might all think of Selectric as “yet another old typewriter,” and I definitely did before learning about it. But...

One thing I was (and still am) worried about when it comes to my recent big interactive essay is that by showing all these classic desktop examples, the whole thing might appear old-fashioned, relevant only to a bygone era. Yet, the challenges it shows are universal. Here’s something I just spotted. This is how you...

I liked this page I just learned of called Incomplete List of Mistakes in the Design of CSS. It might not mean much to you if you don’t write CSS, but could be fun to check out if you do. Here are some choice quotes: border-radius should have been corner-radius. It shouldn’t be !important — that reads to engineers...

A fun (and funny!) 9-minute video from Linternet User about designing a perfect onscreen lever with the right amount of juice: Love seeing real work in progress like that, plus it ends up in a place I didn’t expect. It was also great to see “delay and snap” action elucidated so clearly. It feels like a variant of...

A nice and I think effective notification preview in Retro, with a verbatim sample text of a notification right below its name: Not only you can see exactly what you’re going to get and make a much better-informed decision, but the app even uses actual names of your in-app contacts, so you can relate to the...

I know I’m usually driving the Finder pretty hard, but I think that’s a necessity, given its position as the center of macOS for power users, and its situation where it feels like Apple pretty much gave up on it. But I also want to show things that Finder does well, and this might be something no one does nearly as...

Speaking of breaking search, an absolutely horrendous design decision I just spotted when using Bing Search: Yep, you saw this correctly: as you scroll, the ads (already pretty much masquerading as regular search results) actually get bigger to grab your attention. Jesus. I don’t know why I was reminded of this fav...

Thirteen years ago today, Google killed Google Reader. In 2023, The Verge wrote a great piece about the shutdown: Google’s feed-reading tool offered a powerful way to curate and read the internet and was beloved by its users. Reader launched in 2005, right as the blogging era went mainstream; it made a suddenly huge...

If you stepped into the dwarven capital of Ironforge on September 13, 2005, you would find only bones. Lots of bones. The city, along with every other major population center in World of Warcraft, had been ravaged by a plague that slaughtered players by the thousands, their bleached bones covering every street. This...

In 2023, Neal Agarwal created The Password Game, a viral browser-based game. Wikipedia has a nice summary: Although the initial requirements include setting a minimum of characters or including numbers, uppercase letters, or special characters, the rules gradually become more unusual and complex. These can involve...

In my three decades online, it has never occurred for me to try this, and I found it so delightful once I did – both Chrome and Firefox will quietly rewrite backslashes in URLs into slashes: Not Safari, however, even though the URL living standard says it should. I am very curious if the presence of backslashes in...