This DOS demo called Wake Up! is astonishingly small – only 16 bytes: The demo doesn’t just make QUOD feel gargantuan. Output this one solitary emoji, “Woman Technologist with Light Skin Tone” – 👩🏻‍💻 – and you spent all your 16 bytes, too. (Proof!) The creator’s write-up is a bit hard to follow, but there are some...

The iOS 26 update introduced a bug in the Czech keyboard. Instead of the customary háček (ǍǎĚěǦǧǏǐǑǒǓǔY̌y̌) in the bottom row, another key was duplicated, removing access to the accent character (or, a diacritic) very popular in that language. Here is the before and after of this situation: Ordinarily, this can be...

A simple rule for overflow logic that will prevent your app looking a bit stupid… …is to avoid “more” expanding to just one item. If the expansion takes up as much room as the UI to show the expansion, why not show it in the first place?#details #interface design

A reader asked me this, and I thought I will answer here: One bit of challenge with [where I work] is that my audience isn’t already almost-guaranteed to be into design! They’re hopefully interested in making good software in general, though, and probably curious about the app [I’m building] they could be using. I’m...

I like the Fits on a Floppy manifesto by Matt Sephton: Software should be as small as it can be. Not as a gimmick, but as a discipline. The floppy disk is the measuring stick: 1.44 MB. If the software that ran entire businesses could fit in that space, then a modern, focused, single-purpose tool certainly can. In my...

To me, “tap anywhere at the top to scroll to the beginning” is an amazing and underappreciated mobile gesture: It not only provides an alternative to desktop‘s Home and ⌘↑ keys, but the student laps the teacher here; it’s actually better than every way to scroll to the top on desktop (do you like pressing ⌘↑? do you...

More unexpected Mario content: a 7-minute video speedrunning composite by FlibidyDibidy: This video combines my first 5,162 attempts to speedrun Super Mario Bros. I recorded 193 hours of attempts (and practice) on an original 1985 Nintendo Entertainment System, then I wrote a custom computer program to process those...

I like sharing, thinking about, and revisiting basic rules and principles because they really do ladder up to help you with more complex things down the road. I wrote before how a simple rule to give some breathing room to your length-limited edit fields can be upleveled to a more general “let me color outside the...

Software engineer Ajitem Sahasrabuddhe recently wrote a 6-post series called “Iron Core” about airline ticketing infrastructure. The entire series is probably too software engineer-y for us, but the third part has some interesting info about a particular 1960s user interface called “cryptic mode”: Cryptic mode was...

In light of a recent Googlebook announcement that uses a mouse wiggle gesture for AI (which to me doesn’t seem like a pleasant interaction), some of us were talking about how, on macOS, mouse wiggle helps you locate the cursor by making it bigger. I am maybe a sucker for videos and podcasts where people start...

A fascinating 9-minute video from PawelCodeStuff about randomness in the context of computing: It explains those weird moments where sometimes the computer asks you to wiggle your mouse – to generate unpredictable numbers – although the specifics of what exactly was random in my wiggling was a surprise to me. There...

The post about Photoshop’s new dialogs traveled through some of the internet’s pipes and alleyways. Michael Tsai has a nice roundup of reactions; let me pick a few things that caught my attention. 1. Nick Heer at Pixel Envy made a discovery that Photoshop’s new windows are… websites: Maybe it really is possible to...