For the many early years of its existence, Chrome sported a pretty distinctive – perhaps even iconic? – look to its tabs… …with even the “new tab” button looking like a tab embryo waiting to be brought into existence. At some point, however, during one of the redesigns, the tabs have been flattened to look like many...

I linked to palette cycling before, and I was just reminded of palette cycling art by Mark Ferrari, who back in the 1990s made 30+ landscapes that looked like this: They have been collected on this webpage some 15 years ago, and I’m linking to it in part because it’s also a great explainer of how palette cycling...

Recently, I asked on social media, “Is there a UX design equivalent to this?”, and attached this photo: In case you don’t know, this is a (mythical) male-to-male power extender. Requests for those seem to spike around Christmas, and the reason is this: if you put up your lights, chain them together, and only then...

Three nice moments in Buttondown’s (pretty comprehensive) release notes: There is a filter and tags to search more easily. Blog entries are linked throughout, complete with cover images – it’s a nice way to distinguish small changes from big improvements. The fixes are attributed to specific people. (This part...

Fighting games require rather precise timing: the action is frenetic, the inputs rapid, and the outcomes can be determined by what players do down to – sometimes – individual one-sixtieth-of-a-second frames. This is fine when you play locally, but gets infinitely more tricky the moment you attempt to kick someone’s...

From its earliest days, Macs established an interesting convention – whenever you press a keyboard shortcut to an action that’s somewhere in the app menu, the matching top menu label blinks quickly. Here, I am pressing ⌘A (Edit > Select All), followed by ⌘+ (Format > Font > Bigger), and then ⌘B (Format > Font >...

The Game UI Database is a website that covers the interfaces of almost 2,000 games via over 75,000 screenshots. It has meticulous information architecture, so you can jump into specific sections, for example: Game difficulty settings Game UI settings menus Modals and pop-ups Loading screens HUDs Minimaps Even if...

Various old computers had their keyboards adorned with unique symbols. Companies like Commodore, Atari, Amiga, or even – in its previous life – Apple chose to put their company logos on keys, and there were other weird and obscure keys on weird and obscure keyboards. But it was Apple’s recent push to move their...

Buttondown, a newsletter publisher, has a pretty standard CSS editor in its web app. You can edit the code and whenever you make any change, you can then press the Save button to make it go live: The view also thoughtfully supports pressing ⌘S to do the same thing: However, if there is nothing to save, ⌘S is ignored...

There are two distinct flavors of speedrunning: completing a game as fast as possible through feats of extraordinary mastery, timing, and precision, completing a game as fast as possible by finding all sorts of bugs and exploits in the game (commonly known as “glitches”) that allow the player to find eerie shortcuts...

Anthony Hobday is a product designer and I like his approach of cataloging and sharing references on his website. Here are some choice pages: Uncommon, but useful design terms Notes on software quality and What is good craftspersonship? Notes on visual design and Visual design rules you can safely follow How...

Any Mac app that has to ask for system permissions has its work cut out for it. In a previous post I showed “the MacCharlie method,” which looked like this: DaisyDisk, a disk cleanup app, does something different. First of all, I like that the app icon is animating here to indicate it’s movable. It’s a version of...