An interesting crowdsourcing effort from Mimestream that asks users who want snoozing to pick up a phone and dial their representative put pressure on Gmail to add that feature to the API. I wonder how much of a chance of succeeding this has. The issue has been open since 2018, and was reopened in 2023. It has over...

I feel macOS these days starts feeling like Windows in the 1990s where occasionally some core component of it breaks, and a reboot is necessary to restore it to full functionality again. But even with that in mind: this happened literally right after the reboot, with nothing much happening and no other signs of the...

The breathing light – officially “Sleep Indicator Light” – debuted in the iconic iBook G3 in 1999. It was originally placed in the hinge, but soon was moved to the other side for laptops, and eventually put in desktop computers too: Power Mac, the Cube, and the iMac. The green LED was replaced by a white one, but...

A nice moment spotted in Slack: By definition security and usability coexist wearily, so it was nice someone thought about allowing me to do this at an opportune time, rather than at a random moment that might be extremely untimely or stressful.#got your back #security

I think a lot about bugs or design decisions that make software appear dumb. At some point in my career I started fitting everything against two principles: “don’t make your app treat your user as if they’re dumb” and “don’t make your app itself feel dumb.” To wit: This is, very obviously, my website. I have made it...

A pair of essays has been rattling in my head for a while. First is Kyle Chayka from October, in “TextEdit and the relief of simple software”: Over the past few years, I’ve found myself relying on TextEdit more as every other app has grown more complicated, adding cloud uploads, collaborative editing, and now...

As a Mac user I naturally focus on that platform, but Windows 11 has had its own share of problems – and that list has grown so vast it’s hard to know where to start. So let’s pick it up at random, with a post by Thom Holwerda with a great title “You can actually stop Windows Explorer from flashbanging you in dark...

I have been enthralled with this tiny feature in Google Sheets called “Show edit history,” which premiered in 2019: Mind you, it’s not unconditional love. The execution feels a bit clunky, showing the edit values in a pop-up rather than in situ, with formatting that feels too heavy, and an awkward “No more edit...

A 12-minute video from Tech Rules about how the 2000 PlayStation game Spyro: Year of the Dragon dealt with software piracy: The video extends upon a 2001 Game Developer article by Gavin Dodd, but Tech Rules adds a good intro about PlayStation’s modchips, and then actually shows the piracy protection in action. I’m...

Palette cycling is an interesting technique borne out of limitations of old graphic cards. Today, any pixel can have any color it wants. In the 1970s and 1980s, you were limited to just a few fixed colors: as few as 2 for monochrome displays, or 4, or 8, or – if you were lucky – 16. Some of those fixed palettes,...

A nice 2024 essay by Jim Nielsen about the process of “sanding” user interfaces he’s working on: One of the ways I like to do development is to build something, click around a ton, make tweaks, click around more, more tweaks, more clicks, etc., until I finally consider it done. The clicking around a ton is the...

My post about Flickr URLs gathered some interesting responses (especially on Mastodon, thank you all!), so I thought I’d do what podcasts call a “mailbag episode”! Some people pointed out other good examples for inspiration. Chris Silverman: The idea of URLs as user interface elements is such a good take. I’ve seen...