I want to show you something glorious. This is Bear, the note taking app: There are desktop apps that get flustered if you ⌘+Tab away and back, misplacing focus or closing a dialog box inside. There are iOS apps that fully reset themselves whenever they get swapped out of memory and have to be reloaded. But Bear,...

This is perhaps my favourite feature in Lightroom. You press ⇧T, you draw a few lines, and presto – your photo is now even: This is doubly magical to me. The first part is that this is even possible – that you can straighten the photo in both dimensions after the fact, and save for some parallax nuances the viewer...

In our Unsung yellow pages, in between people writing Chrome plugins to fix UI of other apps, and gamers creating mods to fix bugs that the developers leave behind, we need to make some room for another category of apps. Some time ago, Daniel Kennett created a little utility called Keyhole with a singular purpose:...

The original 2004 Gmail iteration of the now-ubiquitous modern status bar (here presenting undo send) was internally nicknamed a butter bar because… well, just look at it: (I believe at least Google today calls this a snackbar.) The UI pop-up element hosting Google Talk inside Gmail – the very same thing that’s more...

I gasped when I first saw Lightroom do this: I know this won’t have the same effect on you just watching. What happened was that, after I clicked on the Disable button, Lightroom moved the mouse pointer for me. I don’t think I have ever seen anything like this, and it provoked many thoughts and emotions: This feels...

I had some idea that many popular games have mods to tweak them – from small appearance tweaks and fan-made translations, to bigger gameplay or UI changes (and even an occasional trojan horse). What I didn’t know was that for some games there is a whole community of modders who do one thing and one thing only: they...

I recently installed a screenshotting utility CleanShot, and I was enamored with its settings: There’s much to like here – thoughtful grouping and layout, good explanations, more details than expected. There are some nice interaction moments, for example the hints swapping to reflect the current status: The fact...

The keyboard and mouse settings in macOS are kind of boring these days… …but somewhere deep in the underbelly of Settings lives a little nod to the original 1984 Macintosh… …in form of the tortoise/​hare icons: #easter eggs #history #mac os

A 19-minute video from Tantacrul about a parallel universe that’s right next to ours, but most of us don’t get to think about – typography of fonts for music notation: The video has some nice things going on besides specific details and conventions: there is a glimps of an obsolete app with a fascinatingly obtuse...

First of all, correction for part 1 – the “focus mode” wasn’t removed. It was renamed to “quiet mode” and relocated to a different part of the UI, and I failed to spot it there. It’s still slightly perplexing, shiftily capitalized, and I doubt fully effective, but the effort is there: I also want to warn you there...

(This is a meta post about this very blog. If that’s not interesting to you, skip to the next one!) Thank you for all your feedback and bug reports in response to my call two weeks ago. Since then, I: revamped the image and video pipelines, which should make the blog load a lot faster and CPU/GPU struggle a lot...

★★★☆☆ Decades ago, I used to work for a videogame magazine, but those days are long gone, and any videogame I play is a rare and intentional event. Shadow Of The Colossus, the 2005 title directed by Fumito Ueda, felt so important to get to know that I had to borrow a PlayStation in order to play it, instead of...