A good batch of history and observations by Nick Heer at Pixel Envy about ads coming to AI chatbots: It is incredible how far we have come for these barely-distinguished placements to be called “visually separated”. Google’s ads, for example, used to have a coloured background, eventually fading to white. The...

For a few months now, when re-running search queries in Bluesky’s iOS app, I ended up occasionally arriving on the wrong search, and it happened enough that I started suspecting something’s afoot. (Ahand?) So I opened the app on my Mac via iPhone Mirroring, and started clicking testing carefully. This is what I saw:...

This is a nice way iOS Safari behaves the moment you tap one of the font size buttons – it immediately ejects all the other chrome: After Liquid Glass specifically, we seem to be going through an interesting re-evaluation of whether “the content is the king; it should feel expansive and UI should get out of the way...

An interesting 14-minute video about a bug in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas: San Andreas was released in 2004, but the game started breaking only after Windows got updated… in 2024. Turns out the bug was sort of a ticking time bomb just waiting for the right set of conditions. We covered one similar bug before, in...

Half of my education in URLs as user interface came from Flickr in the late 2000s. Its URLs looked like this: flickr.com/photos/mwichary/favorites flickr.com/photos/mwichary/sets flickr.com/photos/mwichary/sets/72177720330077904 flickr.com/photos/mwichary/54896695834...

A good quick essay by Ahmad Shadeed about a mistake I bet I committed myself, too – switching to a full-width style too soon with responsive design, which makes pages look strange: Shadeed argues that this ugly responsive interregnum happens a lot more than people might assume, as part of natural window management...

★★★★★ (as books) ★★★★☆ (for the purposes of this blog) I still remember Mac OS X arriving on the scene with icons that felt infinite in every possible way: in size, in color palette, in dimensionality. We got used to them over the last quarter century, but Michael Flarup’s books rekindled that feeling for me; the...

Another good post from Roger Wong thinking through Anthropic’s findings on how offloading coding effort leads to understanding less: So the AI group didn’t finish meaningfully faster, but they understood meaningfully less. And the biggest gap was in debugging—the ability to recognize when code is wrong and figure...

I was randomly checking the Wikipedia entry for killer apps – apps that were so good that they single-handedly made people buy a particular hardware platform just to run them (Wii Sports for Nintendo Wii, Super Mario 64 for Nintendo 64, and so on). There are some interesting nuggets in there I didn’t know, like...

I was embarrassed for Apple when I saw the recent bug fix for columns introduce a new bug, explained in this post by Jeff Johnson: Without the path bar, the columns are now taller, but the vertical scrollers remain the same height as before, leaving vertical gaps, a ridiculous amount of space between the bottom of...

Old-school computing has a term “molly guard”: it’s the little plastic safety cover you have to move out of the way before you press some button of significance. Anecdotally, this is named after Molly, an engineer’s daughter who was invited to a datacenter and promptly pressed a big red button, as one would. Then...

The UI for filing bugs is inscrutable and has too many hoops to jump through. No one does anything unless every field has been filed meticulously and there is a clear repro. The designer is ridiculed if the thing isn’t actually a bug, is a duplicate, or if it was filed in the wrong place. Front-end bugs are...