Let’s say you are in Reeder (an RSS reader for iOS), looking at the list of posts, and already from the title you know you don’t care, and you want to mark it as read. You can tap to see it and then swipe back the moment it shows. This is the slow path. There is a faster path. Reeder enables you to slide right or...

A 16-minute video from Ahoy from last year about Chris Sawyer, creator of Transport Tycoon and Rollercoaster Tycoon games from the late 1990s. The video focuses more on the economics of the industry and some technical details, but what’s interesting to me was how tight those two games felt in terms of UI. They have...

One of my favourite recently-noticed little patterns is this one thoughtful accelerant in iOS Photos. If you want to add a photo to an album, you normally have to choose from a list of albums: However, once you do that one time, a new menu option appears. It’s effectively “Add again quickly to the album you just...

★★★★☆ I liked this book. I consider Cory Doctorow a good, smart writer. He can put together one good sentence after another (“this is why the roads leading to Amazon depots are littered with sealed bottles of human urine”), he can tell stories of boring things in riveting ways, and he can connect various themes and...

John Gruber (twice) on macOS Tahoe rounded corners (previously), with a nice bit of archeology: It was, I’d argue, a small mistake for Apple to stop putting a visual affordance in the lower right corner of windows to show where to click to resize the window. It was a bigger mistake to change the scrollbars on MacOS...

This 13-minute video from Wes Bos analyzes this today-almost-mythical McMaster-Carr website and figures out why it’s so fast. It’s perhaps more technical than what I usually link to, but shows what can happen if someone really cares about performance. What’s interesting to me is that the author posits that it’s...

When home computers were new, there was this enduring myth of “killer poke.” POKE was a pretty low-level BASIC command that allowed you to write any number to any place in the memory, as there was no memory protection. From that developed a set of myths of the right magical pairs of numbers that could be input and...

A nice short analysis of window resizing in macOS Tahoe by Nobert Heger: Since upgrading to macOS Tahoe, I’ve noticed that quite often my attempts to resize a window are failing. This never happened to me before in almost 40 years of using computers. So why all of a sudden? I understand this might be the casualty of...

A 6-minute video from JHR about the 1980s British game Jet Set Willy, a big prize for its completion, the bug that made it unplayable, the copy protection, the hackers, and the mess of it all.#bugs #games #history #youtube

I still sometimes think of the miracle that is Undo Send in Gmail. Michael Leggett announcing it in 2009: This feature can’t pull back an email that’s already gone; it just holds your message for five seconds so you have a chance to hit the panic button. And don’t worry – if you close Gmail or your browser crashes...

This appeared when trying to delete (even when trying to Delete Immediately, skipping the trash altogether): Same thing right after, when trying to tag some existing items, for which I don’t imagine any new space should be necessary: Also, why are these dialogs so different? I feel like not so long ago there were...

I have been wondering the other day why aren’t there more mouse pointer museums and here’s one – Amiga Pointer Archive! (Amiga was a 16-bit home computer especially popular in Europe.) Doesn’t work so well on mobile, but it’s fun on desktop. I recommend zooming the page to 200%. #history #iconography #interface...