I read Erika Hall’s Just Enough Research. I’m not going review the entire book as it feels a bit off-topic for this blog, but the chapter about surveys had me nodding my head so much I’d love to excerpt a few things: The questions can be asked in person or over the phone, or distributed on paper or collected online....

Mac allows you to assign keyboard shorcuts to menu items, but the interface is clunky – you have to select the app even if you just came from it, and then type in the menu item name by hand without any assistance: Other tools, like Keyboard Maestro, do something similar. You either have to type it again, or you can...

Before computer graphics, movies relied on matte paintings to extend or flesh out the background. This is perhaps my favourite matte painting, from the end credits of Die Hard 2: Turns out, videogames do something similar, except the result is called a skybox, since it has to encompass the player from all sides....

Beagle Bros was a 1980s software company making apps for Apple II that is still remembered fondly for their personality. The company had a hobbyist slant, selling various small tools and collections with fun names like Beagle Bag (in the “Indoor Sports” collection) and DOS Boss and Utility City – similar perhaps to...

A thoughtful essay by Nick Heer as a sidebar to the annual Apple/Six Colors report card, in which he proposes this simple framework: In short, the way I think about software quality is the amount of meaningful problems. […] There are problems in Finder — resizing columns, renaming or deleting files synced with a...

When you start a new game in SimCity 2000 (you can try it in the browser yourself), as the city is generated, you see a few messages fly by: Creating Hills, Tracing Rivers, Smoothing. Among them, for a bit, one can see “Reticulating Splines”: If it was not obvious from seeing Smoothing followed by More Smoothing and...

This was a fun 15-minute architectural video from Stewart Hicks (absolutely worth a follow otherwise) that mapped precisely into the same kind of tension and internal debate I sometimes feel when talking about minimalism in UX design: Minimalism is good! Until it’s not! One interesting lesson here is that the famous...

I keep thinking about this very good 11-minute Not Just Bikes video about traffic calming. In it, a simple argument is made: the posted speed limit of any given street or road doesn’t really matter. What matters is how the street feels. Generously wide and separated lanes, sparse traffic lights, and the road being...

This from a blog post by my friend Glenn Fleishman about audio/​video settings in macOS just made me laugh: It’s doubly funny if you are aware of Fleishman’s extensive experience in printing. Also, this: I guess this is how I keep humble. Despite decades of using a Mac, I can still miss a Video menu in an audio...

I thought Safari’s release notes are pretty good – exhaustive, direct, something you won’t ever read for pleasure, but something you can actually learn a lot from even if you are just scanning. I wish either MDN or Can I use… integrated them in some way (and, of course Chrome’s and Firefox’s as well), so that...

A really interesting 28-minute video by daivuk about making a first-person shooter game QUOD that fit in just 64 kilobytes: I found watching it strangely enthralling and even nerve racking. The creator keeps adding stuff that seemingly has no chance of fitting into such a small space – textures! sounds effects!...

As you progress in your UI design career, you learn that there are quite a few unsolvable challenges: do you write My Items or Your Items in UI? do you put hand cursors over buttons? for a boolean item (especially in the menu), do you talk about the present state or the future state? do you try to solve for change...