Paul Ford in 2014: As far as I can tell, no truly huge world-shifting software product has ever existed in only one version (even Flappy Bird had updates). Just about every global software product of longevity grows, changes, adapts, and reacts to other software over time. So I set myself the task of picking five...

One of the readers (thank you, Peter!) reminded me that there is a version of a blink comparator that all of us are exposed to perhaps every day: many photo editing apps – Apple Photos, Darkroom, Aphera, I imagine others – allow you to quickly compare the photo as-shot and with your edits. Sometimes it’s a tap,...

The 2016 launch of No Man’s Sky and the 2020 launch of Cyberpunk 2077 were catastrophes. No Man’s Sky fell so incredibly short of the promises the founder shared over the years – from smaller ones like rivers on the surface of planets, to huge ones like seeing other players – that some people felt it must have been...

Just like the video I shared last week, this 20-minute video by Mariana Colín at The Morbid Zoo is sharper than most, and also extremely entertaining: Colín is not “in tech,” and the video is of “the king is naked” variety which is very, very refreshing. Among many good observations, this caught my attention as...

In late 2023, designer Anthony Hobday published a small list of 20 interface quality of life improvements, and recently Hobday and Katie Langerman chatted about it on an episode of their podcast Complementary. It’s a fun listen (perhaps if you skip a bit of a bummer 9-minute beginning), covering four listed things...

You might have seen this, one of the strangest and most primitive experiences in macOS, where you’re asked to press keys next to left Shift and right Shift, whatever they might be. Perhaps I can explain. There are three main international keyboard layout variants in common use: American (ANSI, with a horizontal...

A 21-minute video from Karl Jobst about a 2025 videogame cheating scandal: In short: One of the professional teams in the FPS game Squad built a sophisticated set of scripts that made it easier to use the game for esports tournaments by adding additional UI, useful stats, a floating camera, an extra...

Two great posts about interaction latency on the hardware and software side. First is from Ink & Switch: There is a deep stack of technology that makes a modern computer interface respond to a user’s requests. Even something as simple as pressing a key on a keyboard and having the corresponding character appear in a...

In the previous post, I wrote: I understand that the best way to compare two things visually is to switch between them promptly in situ; our visual system is really good at spotting even small changes when aided this way. I thought it would be fun to talk about it briefly, because it gives me a chance to show you a...

I was impressed with this clever internal interface at Linear, shown inside this larger blog post: The dev toolbar exists directly inside the app and allows us to easily toggle feature flags on and off. When something didn’t look right in the refreshed UI, it took us just one click to compare it with the previous...

This 25-minute segment on MKBHD’s Waveform podcast (video or audio, segment starts at 40:21) is from November 2024, and is a nice counterpart to the post about favourite well-made apps and sites. The original theme is “what is an app that you use all the time, and like to use, but is actually a bad app?” but it...

A few years ago, I suggested adding a new interaction to Figma. If your text cursor was on a misspelled word (anywhere inside, or the edges), you could press Tab to quickly accept the suggested correction, without even seeing it: Independently, Google Docs approached it from a slightly different angle, but landing...