Interactive explainers are one of my favourite things about the web: people passionate about things introduce them to others, for free, with care, and often using some interesting interactive or educational approaches in the process. I picked a few I particularly liked for this post. These aren’t just explaining...

The otherwise excellent note-taking app Bear has an interesting bug that’s worth talking about while it’s still here. When you’re around to-do items, you can press ⌘. (period) to toggle any task complete or incomplete. It’s actually a really fun shortcut in practice: But when you have a larger selection with a mixed...

I hate lorem ipsum with passion, but guess what? There’s more intentionality in it than I assumed, and even easter eggs, as this fun 25-minute mini documentary from Emily Zhang/​Rabbit Hole shows: You can tell that this was not the work of an amateur. The garbled text is done with a lot of care and knowledge. You...

In last week’s post, I made an off-hand comment about Vercel’s Geist Pixel announcement, and I thought it might be interesting to turn this into more of a full-fledged critique. I don’t think it’s a good announcement, but its flaws are pretty universal, so I want to put words to these flaws. This will extend to a...

A nice moment in Google Maps – if you are travelling by public transit, an indicator shows not just the current stop on the list in real time, but also exactly where you are in between stops: It’s not just something traditionally delightful, a cute big icon moving smoothly. I also think it’s very helpful. Travelling...

I know I just mentioned the Google Search app, but I’m also in the process of disentangling myself from Google and Gmail after last week’s Google I/O revelations. On that note, this is an interesting, meandering essay by Ernie Smith at Tedium, reflecting on the enshittification of Google and the two-year anniversary...

Do you know those “Are you still here” screens? In some cases – like banking – they are ostensibly there to improve security. In public transit ticket or similar machines, on the other hand, they exist just so the machine can easily reset itself ahead of a future customer. Resetting to default state happens on your...

I absolutely love Jimmy Maher’s body of work. He’s been writing about older games and software in general since 2011; it’s always solid, always an enjoyable read, and always providing new perspectives even on stuff I thought I knew well. (Maher also goes by The Digital Antiquarian.) I linked to his work once before,...

The biggest smallest GUI design schism between Apple’s platforms and Windows isn’t the black vs. white cursor or where to put the menu bar. It’s the presentation of keyboard shortcuts. On a Mac, the shortcuts are iconographic. Command is ⌘. Option is ⌥. Shift is ⇧. Control is ⌃. Fn is 🌐. There are also icons for all...

Do you remember the video I once shared about making a song in Strudel? I recently stumbled upon this 20-minute YouTube video by iSongs of someone recreating Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” in GarageBand on their iPhone: Like the previous video, I believe this is so tight as it was previously rehearsed/​prepared, which...

I generally avoid think pieces about AI because a) a lot of them are boring, and b) they rarely match the pragmatic posture of this blog. But this essay on a new No One’s Happy blog was really interesting to read, and feels different in a few ways. First, it examines what happens as AI slop spreads in the context...

The Ringer journalist Brian Phillips asked on Bluesky: I’m working on a column about the tech annoyances that drive us crazy, and I want it to be as universal as possible, so tell me yours! E.g. scanning a QR code to read a menu, never receiving the one-time passcode they supposedly texted you, “verify you’re human”...