A nice little old-school moment from Flickr: When you accidentally type the name of the new photo album in the search field instead of the “new album name” field, Flickr just passes on that value to save you from having to retype it: (I bet you witness a version of this all the time when dealing with “I forgot my...

1. In last year’s essay at Tedium, Ernie Smith investigated the rise and fall of screensavers, those pieces of software that peaked in the 1990s, originally meant to prolong the life of your display by kicking in after a period of inactivity, but eventually becoming “self-contained art projects.” As it always...

John Gruber at Daring Fireball talks about a problem in SwiftUI-based macOS and iOS apps where undo is completely broken during text editing: Basic stuff that’s worked reliably for decades — some things that heretofore had worked forever — are dangerously broken. If you’re running MacOS 26 Tahoe, open Journal and...

Nick Heer’s analysis of Apple’s Pages interface over time is a nice counterpart to the recent post about Sinofsky doing the same for the early years of Microsoft Office. Here is the key comparison, 2011–2025: I’ll let you read the whole excellent analysis and Heer poking at the notion of “content over chrome” which...

A nice blog post by Nathan Manceaux-Panot on Pending Design about the subtle design of the tabs underneath the search results in the programming editor Nova: Through buttons right below its text field, the bar also lets you filter results: only show files, only show symbols, or only show symbols in current tabs....

★★★★☆ (as a book) ★★★☆☆ (for the purposes of this blog) There are as many books about Steve Jobs as there were Quadra models, but they focus mostly on two phases: 1955–1985 – Steve Jobs befriending Wozniak, the early days of Apple, Lisa, and the Mac 1997–2011 – Steve Jobs’s “second act” at Apple, and the creation of...

Welcome to another Super Mario Sunday! This is an 11-minute video from gruz talking about the fascinating world of South Korean bootleg Marios, such as Super Boy, Super Bros World, and Super Bio Man – existing solely because of Korea’s subpar copyright law of that era: In short: The code was copyrighted, but the IP...

A nice moment in the iOS emoji keyboard – after selecting an emoji from the grid, its name shows up for a second: I have small reservations here, as reusing a placeholder like this trips up my “this is cheap” alarm. But otherwise I like that this – just like keyboard shortcuts in menus or tooltips – ambiently...

Two nice follow-ups to topics we covered before. In February, Nobert Heger did some analysis of precisely which pixels in Tahoe are intercepted by mouse when trying to resize a window. In April, Steve Ruiz, author of tldraw, did this more extensively for all the drawing apps like Canva, Figma, Illustrator, and so...

Ever since I wrote a post about the molly guard, I have been on the lookout for those, and I think I collected enough to do a little follow-up. First, some classic industrial molly guards from a museum in Germany: This IBM electronic typewriter had a gorgeous perspex molly guard around the power button: Other...

In 2021 and 2022, product manager Steven Sinofsky wrote a… …first-person account of what I saw at the PC revolution from the perspective of joining Microsoft as a newly hired software design engineer fresh from graduate school working on developer tools, through my time as a program manager and ultimately leading...

This is not italics. This is not even oblique. This is a side effect of how those displays work. Instead of a whole rectangle of pixels being changed at once, the display is updated line by line, starting from the top one. As it’s moving towards the bottom, the internal horizontal position might have already...