I have recently stumbled upon two websites that try to do something interesting and inspiring when it comes to showing scale. John Wallace’s Tangible Media Connection’s initial appearance might not feel very well-crafted, but jump to any page (for example this one) and it’s astonishing how great the photos of the...

I have been thinking about this a lot since the pandemic, and Rob Napier on Mastodon summarized this really well: I spent a lot of time in the 90s working on Y2K. It wasn’t a huge panic. It was just a slice out of everything else we spent auditing code. It wasn’t “spend 80 hours a week fixing this.” It was just...

The state of menus on Google’s search result page: all inconsistent, most ugly, ignoring UI mechanics learned decades ago (for example understanding the importance of diagonal movement or supporting mousedown-drag-mouseup in addition to just clicking), with easily triggered buggy states, bad animations, and even...

I am still figuring out what this blog is, and I hope I’m not going to make this part too awkward, but I’d love once in a while to point to someone whose work I admire or find inspiring. I just spent an hour or so simply scrolling through David Aerne’s Bluesky feed, and I felt it was just so much fun for me. David...

A good 22-minute video from XDA about the debacle that was Windows Vista and the corrective measure that followed, Windows 7: It taught me many things and it clarified that things were more complicated than they seemed. Windows Vista (widely seen as failure) perhaps wasn’t so bad, and 7 (quoted by many as the best...

An absolutely fantastic post about software nudges and pop-ups by Mike Swanson: If you’ve ever read about “choice architecture” and nudging, this will feel familiar. The modern language for it was popularized in the late 2000s, and the core idea is simple: how choices are presented changes what people do, even if...

Neil Panchal writing in 2020 about a cool little page called diskprices.com: The performance of this website is stellar. It loads almost instantly. And the list (although it’s not sortable) gets the job done, it is sorted by price already which is the most important attribute. Diskprices.com deserves the UI/UX award...

I stumbled upon this small page about friction by Carl Barenbrug. I found myself vehemently disagreeing with one example listed; I don’t think Undo Send is an example of friction, as to me it actually feels like the exact opposite (“Are you sure you want to send this email?” dialog box would be friction – just like...

I love how this Byte magazine archive by Hector Dearman tries to do something different. It inspired me, and reminded me of the excitement of what Internet was supposed to be. I think we all wanted the web to feel more like this – fast, with infinite information right at your fingertips, the biggest library you...

A great post duet from Craig Hockenberry that flew by on Mastodon and clarified something for me: [For] the extra work to create a custom SF Symbol, our experience is 8-10 hours per symbol. This is also an expert level task: lots of knowledge on how SVG control points work and how to maintain compatibility across...

A week ago I asked on Mastodon and Bluesky: What are you favourite well-made apps or sites? Phones and computers alike. Doesn’t have to be “pretty,” but well-made according to whatever definition works for you. I specifically made it kind of vague, and these are the answers I got. I grouped them into categories and...

If you choose to remove the app names from the springboard, a small thing Apple could do would be to show the app name in the long-press menu here. Otherwise, I found it feels really easy to forget the name over time! (It would be a small riff on this disambiguation detail.) #interface design #ios #touch