A fantastic 37-minute video by Nic Barker that explains ASCII, Unicode codepoints, and their relationship to UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32. I learned a lot, and I never thought I’d walk away from the video appreciating the craft of text encoding. Also, really good storytelling! #encoding #typography #youtube

This is neither the first nor the last time I’m sharing David Jonathan Ross’s work; today I want to link to a really fun glyph explorer he put together recently: That’s it. That’s the tweet. On this blog I generally want to capture the meaning of well-made things, deeper thinking, going beyond cheap sugary delight,...

A few thoughts after reading Gruber’s take on Finder and its new auto-sizing columns: 1. Column view as a concept and when done well deserves to be in the UI hall of fame. It flew and still can fly high in the Finder, and it was the unsung hero of both the iPod and the iPhone. It’s really fun to fire up NeXTSTEP 0.8...

Just a few hours after writing about floppy disks, I stumbled upon a bona fide floppy icon in the Bluesky’s iOS app, anno domini 2026: I imagine this, in a nerdy view deep inside settings, might be more of a fun nod, but it made me curious – does Word still use a floppy icon? Yes, it does! Right next to the...

Everybody who routinely takes screenshots on a Mac knows very well the motor memory heaven and hell that are the screenshotting shortcuts: ⌘⇧3 to grab the whole screen, ⌘⇧4 to grab part of it, hold ⌃ ahead of time to put the result in the clipboard, press space at the right moment to select a window, hold ⌥ at a...

This 9-minute video from the fun game show Lateral (with Tom Scott!) covers a particularly interesting bug in the 1984 game Karateka: If you don’t want to watch the video and try to figure it out alongside contestants, you can read more about it here, and also see it in action. Karateka was made by Jordan Mechner...

Many designers and engineers have Apple products with their flawless and praise-worthy trackpads. By default on macOS, trackpad means only “shy” (iPhone-like) scrollbars are shown. Shy scrollbars become half-visible when two-finger scrolling, and only fully visible when hovering over them. To anyone working on...

An entertaining 9-minute video by Shloop that starts with a common mistake of typing in an English mode on a Korean keyboard, but then goes through a bunch of other fun and light input internationalization stories: This is the page for non-English programming languages that is shown at some point. Quite a bit of...

This first one – in response to pressing the volume buttons – feels world-class. Subtle responses to buttons being pressed, nice haptics, good physics: This one – stretching of the control center – made me incredulous. The performance and physics of it all are good and fluid, but this feels like absolutely the wrong...

This is a really funny story happening in the online universe of Final Fantasy 11: Once killed, a notorious monster shouldn’t respawn until after the next monthly tally, but lately defeated notorious monsters in Limbus have been reappearing early. That’s because, Square Enix said, “the server-side data recording the...

I recently learned of the OG App from 2022, which offered an ad-free, simpler experience to users frustrated with Instagram changes. The app didn’t last – it couldn’t last – but it was a fascinating statement. In a different corner of the internet, Michael Leggett, one of the former Gmail designers, created Simplify...

After James Moylan’s death in December, we were reminded again of the Moylan Arrow, the little arrow telling you which side of your car has the little fuel door: I started wondering: what would be the conceptual equivalent of this in software? My best guess would be iOS offering to fill the one-time code from a...