Even before the “remaster,” my essay about the Polish S bug was routinely discovered by Hacker News and other places, so I thought I would take a look at all the commentary over the years and summarize. First, pragmatically, these are the lessons for any keyboard shortcut designer: On Windows, AltGr (Right Alt) and...

I praised ⌘⇥ recently in my essay for cleverly not showing itself when you press the keys really fast. Here’s another nice detail. If you press and hold ⌘⇥, you will eventually stop at the end. (You can then press ⌘⇧⇥ or ⌘` to go in the other direction.) However, if you are already at the end, pressing ⌘⇥ again...

For decades now, Raymond Chen has been posting to his blog The Old New Thing about various technical Microsoft quirks, occasionally venturing into Unsung territory. Last week, Chen shared a nice remembrance of Tony Krueger, a person responsible for implementing the red squiggly underlines in Word: Tony worked on...

Apple might have undone the macOS Tahoe menu icons decision, but this wasn’t the only contentious iconography issue in their ecosystem. On his blog, Jim Nielsen writes how Apple filed away so much expression by forcing rigid icon bureaucracy in macOS. Nielsen focuses mostly on distinctiveness; previously, you could...

Speaking of remastering (and diacritics), I grabbed my older Medium deep dive called The curious case of the disappearing Polish S, and put it on the new site. It looks so much better than on Medium and while I was at it, I’ve redone all the visuals, and updated it a little bit.) It’s still probably one of my...

In 1982, the videogame Yars’ Revenge for the Atari 2600 needed to show a “neutral zone” in the middle of the screen. The console was so primitive – an entire great book was written about this – that it didn’t have any video memory. Any cheap effect would do, even random noise… but something as simple as generating...

A few readers wrote in response to me sharing Panic’s blog to say that they witnessed online publications doing the same. Here’s a 1993 essay by William Langewiesche from The Atlantic Online (sic!) that’s still on the web – which, by the way, you should read because it’s really great writing – juxtaposed with a...

Duff’s device is a C language technique that looks like this: send(to, from, count) { register n = (count + 7) / 8; switch (count % 8) { case 0: do { *to = *from++; case 7: *to = *from++; case 6: *to = *from++; case 5: *to = *from++; case 4: *to = *from++; case 3: *to = *from++; case 2: *to = *from++; case 1: *to =...

On the most recent episode of The Talk Show podcast, this monologue from Jason Snell made me nod my head (the passage starts at 1:35:47): [… Apple] decides to do a big feature. The circus comes to town, they build the feature, they launch it, they leave town, and that feature sits there. And the problem is, there’s...

For a while, the digital artist James Dalzell Hodge kept a video diary of various design decisions while making his next game. This 13-minute video is interesting because it harks back to my mention of diegetic interfaces just a few days ago: It’s a nice quick dive into the subject – a rare coverage of what...

A week of heads up before the payment happens The specific amount I’ll be charged shown Clarity about what is renewing and what I’m getting out of it Even a reminder about what Nova is, in case I stopped using it Seems obvious, but so many places fail at some, and sometimes all of these.#nova #panic #writing

I keep thinking about MacCharlie, this strange product from 1985 that turned the original Macintosh into a dual-purpose machine that could also run software by its chief competitor, early PCs: I’m fascinated by it because it almost feels like cargo culting: “hey, PCs are big and ugly, so if we make a Mac big and...