The best thing the crypto industry coined might have been the expression “rug pull,” but I’m not happy about that. To me, it perfectly describes how it feels when an app or a website randomly changes your scroll position for no rhyme or reason. You’ve seen it so many times before: you start reading a webpage, but it...

Randomly found this 2014 Dribbble from Jamie Nicoll and it made me smile: For context, Save For Web was a popular export function in Photoshop at the peak of its use for web design, but assigned a rather unpleasant ⌘⌥⇧S shortcut. Using it often turned your hand into a… claw of sorts. There was a Tumblr cataloging...

A fascinating 25-minute video from Mark Brown at Game Maker’s Toolkit about how the team building Grand Theft Auto 3 conquered the technical limitations of PlayStation 2: How do you squeeze a city that occupies over 50 megabytes into the 32MB memory of the console? You simply do what The Truman Show did, and...

Since the early 2000s, Mac OS X had a few orientations of icons depending on whether they were applications, files, utilities and so on: In 2020, macOS Big Sur unified those styles and made them more iOS-like: A few years later, Jim Nielsen revisited the icon “Big Sur-ification”, and showed examples of apps that did...

In his latest video, Shelby from Tech Tangents unpacked, installed, and put to use a truly forgotten product: IBM 3119, one of the first consumer flatbed scanners. The setup was a small nightmare, needing a rare hardware card installed in a specific computer, an ultra-particular combination of two operating systems...

I have a confession to make. I prefer Apple TV’s 2015 remote: The remote was universally ridiculed for its “which way is up?” problem – too much vertical symmetry which didn’t give your hand enough cues to know whether you’re picking it up the right way or the wrong way. Apple tried a half-measure first; in 2017...

On April Fools in 2021, the popular xkcd comic ran Checkbox, which was a Morse code puzzle in disguise. (It’s interesting to see the community trying to figure out what it actually does.) Engineer Max Goodhart built the front-end and wrote a summary of the whole project: This year was a doozy. We specced and...

The Pixar animated short Lifted was released in front of Ratatouille in 2006: I’ve always been amused by this imaginary interface, which is so clearly not how any sort of computer would work. Or so I thought. These are photos I took in Melbourne in 2024 of CSIRAC, Australia’s first digital computer from about 1949:...

A surprising entry in the thread started by Photoshop and continuing through screwdriver handles is this 11-minute video from Errant Signal about a platformer game called Derelict Star: I was inspired by the video, and really enjoyed its exploration of a demanding game that’s composed of just a few mechanics that...

Should you ever be worried that displaying just one glyph could take almost 2 seconds and slow down your website by as much? Naw, of course not. This wasn’t a problem already in the 1980s and, in the lord’s year 2026, computers are pretty good at rendering a letter or a symbol at a moment’s notice. Ha. I was just...

I found this 9-minute video from Rex Krueger about screwdriver handle design really interesting in the context of my post about Photoshop’s dialogs. Screwdriver handles evolved over the decades in response to user needs and usage patterns, with a few clever affordances: some for everyone, some for specific use cases...

It’s hard to be in charge of continuity on a movie set. It would already be difficult under the best of circumstances: after all, you can’t freeze the sun in the sky, prevent hot drinks from going cold, cigarettes from extinguishing themselves, or entropy in general from doing all the stuff it loves doing. But on...