⌘T is a very important shortcut in Slack. It allows you to quickly talk to someone just by typing in their name. I use it probably dozens, if not hundreds of times a day. ⌘T is right next to ⌘R, which reloads Slack. Occasionally, on the way to ⌘T, my fingers graze ⌘R. Fingers being fingers, I immediately realize...

This video from Marblr about adding fall damage to Overwatch is really intense – 45 minutes of length and a lot of footage of frantic gameplay – but really informative, too. It’s a great case study of how something seemingly really simple – deducting health from the player as they fall from height – can be a...

It’s hard to imagine it now, but during iPhone’s first year, no emoji were available at all. It took four years until 2011’s iOS 5 gave everyone an emoji keyboard. But in between 2008 and 2011, there existed a peculiar interregnum where emoji were only available on Japanese iPhones. The situation had to be carefully...

I just stumbled upon a nice little power-user innovation in Chrome’s Web Inspector. In Safari, and previously in Chrome, when editing CSS properties, you’d get a usual editing typeahead for the property name, and then the same on the other side for the property value. In newer versions of Chrome, the typeahead menu...

I know we’re probably collectively a bit tired talking about macOS Tahoe, but I just noticed something that I think is a good example of how small details can ladder up to bigger things. This is macOS Sequoia (the pre-Tahoe release) and a typical pop-up button: One clever thing macOS has been doing since basically...

The year is 1981. Your IBM PC is equipped with a tragic speaker that sounds awful for anything except occasional beeps. (Those beeps sound awful, too.) You can’t afford a sound card and besides, sound cards for your PC have not been invented yet. You can’t even afford a floppy drive, so you’re one of the rare people...

This blog is about craft, but sometimes the answer to craft is not skill or taste or awareness or effort, but it’s creating conditions for craft to flourish. Workday looks like Workday, and your banking app looks like your banking app, not because there aren’t enough designers and engineers around that know how to...

One of the most mysterious keys on the PC keyboard has always been Scroll Lock, joining Caps Lock and Num Lock to create the instantly recognizable LED triumvirate: Scroll Lock was reportedly specifically added for spreadsheets, and it solved a very specific problem: before mice and trackpads, and before fast...

I realized recently that I conflated two similar user-interface comedy skits. This one is from Sean Wing from 2023: And this older one is from Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, from 2009: Speaking of Tim and Eric, this one was also funny and ostensibly on topic for this blog! (And re: previous post – I had to...

From May last year, a 21-minute video by Linus Boman about font piracy, specifically during the era of personal computing and early internet: The nuances of what separates font piracy from non-pirated revivals or general inspiration are too much even for me, but I liked how the video moved on from the obvious and...

Those terms confused me back in the day, and occasionally they still do, so I thought it might be nice to write it all out. This is how I understand them: deterministic: whenever you do something, it gives you identical results as any previous or next time you do it idempotent: if you do something twice, or thrice,...

As a former ISP employee I occasionally like dipping my toes into some networking stuff, and this 25-minute video from The Serial Port is a good retelling of the day in 2014 when one of internet’s important routing tables crossed a threshold of 512K, which caused all sorts of trouble: What I appreciate about The...