#easter eggs #humor

Go to Settings > Accessibility > Zoom, and then turn on “Use scroll gesture with modifier keys to zoom.” Then, at any moment, you can hold Control and swipe with two fingers (or use a scroll wheel) up or down to zoom the entire screen. I’d also recommend turning off “Smooth images” under “Advanced…” so you see...

★★☆☆☆ The new book by Stewart Brand is tackling a subject that’s important to me. The introduction struck a chord: The apparent paradox is profound: Maintenance is absolutely necessary and maintenance is optional. It is easy to put off, yet it has to be done. Defer now, regret later. Neglect kills. What to do?...

This is a thoughtful post from Florian Schulz about designing a typeahead experience. I liked the details both within the implementation – for example, making sure the kerning is preserved! – but also in the presentation. I particularly enjoyed Schulz making the component demo itself, rather than using prerecorded...

Multibowl is one of my favourite emulation projects because it’s a rare example of using emulators creatively, rather than for nostalgia or research. It’s a 2016 game by Bennett Foddy and AP Thompson that reimagines older existing games as smaller pieces of a new, Super Mario Party-like experience. Two players...

The story about the original Macintosh’s built-in font set being named after “world-class cities” is well known and documented by Susan Kare on the Folklore site: The first Macintosh font was designed to be a bold system font with no jagged diagonals, and was originally called “Elefont”. There were going to be lots...

In the Fallout 3: Broken Steel addition, the team wanted to introduce a moving subway train under Washington, D.C.: However, the engine did not have any moving vehicles. Instead of adding a new kind of primitive into the game engine, the creators… made the player character itself become the subway car when in...

A thoughtful 26-minute talk by Imani Joy, the solitary full-time designer on Mastodon, reflecting on her nine months there: It’s an interesting peek behind the curtain at designing for this particular space, and the many unenviable constraints: lack of data, care for privacy, tension between Mastodon’s power-user...

Column view cut its teeth on NeXT computers… …and blossomed on early versions of Mac OS X… …but where I thought it really shone was the first iPods: This was perhaps the most fun you could ever have navigating a hierarchy of things; it made sense what left/​right/up/​down meant in this universe, to a point you could...

An excellent 17-minute video from The Art Of Storytelling that analyzes the now-infamous 2021 Mark Zuckerberg Metaverse introduction video: What I liked about it is that the author goes beyond cheap shots and deeper into both storytelling aspects (drawing from his experience)… Now, as you can tell, the big problem...

Connecting to public wi-fi networks with their captive portals is always a bit of a wonky proposition, and nothing makes public wi-fi wonkier than using it on a plane. I believe that the resurgence of https made things harder – if the captive portal doesn’t kick in, no secure traffic can happen – and over time I...

Not long ago, a blog I otherwise like a lot included this passage: Designers have been saying this for years. Cameras don’t take pictures, photographers do. Tools don’t make you a better designer. Now the PM world is arriving at the same conclusion. I am not linking to the post because I hear this argument from time...