★★★☆☆ I was delighted by the Laws of UX website when it came out. The site was beautiful (it still is!) and it felt important to bring some of this stuff to designers earlier in their careers. But the book based on the website was largely a disappointment, and seems like a good case study of an unsuccessful...

When you accidentally rename a file to a name that already exists, Finder tells you about it, and then just dumps you out of rename, so you have to enter rename mode again and type the desired name. This feels like such a 1990s way of doing things: throwing a dialog box and washing your hands away from the...

I hate most font reveals; they’re written in a pretentious, corporate-meets-Design-with-capital-D way that’s devoid of any value or meaning or feeling, with the requisite highly polished motion graphics that feel pretty like empty sugar calories. They did feel like written by AI before that became a meme. This feels...

I was just looking at some old 1980s screenshots and wondering “why don’t you ever see syntax highlighting in inverse video”? And then I randomly stumbled upon this deep dive into syntax highlighting from Nikita Prokopov. I don’t know if I disagree with everything here, but there’s a lot of great stuff in there, and...

Bear – beautiful, whimsical, delightful, but dry on the details. This window was on the screen for many minutes: Obsidian (or, at least, the suggested Obsidian Apple Notes import plugin) – functional, informative, precise, but a bit on an uglier side: As the meme goes, why not both?#bear #details #interface design...

A 2021 article by David Hall about shape coding: Chapanis began interviewing pilots who had crashed B-17s and B-25s and a pattern emerged that turned his attention to the controls within the cockpit. As Fitts said ‘the intense effort to produce new weapons, the race against time in industrial production, and the...

A thoughtful look at macOS 26’s application of Liquid Glass by Howard Oakley: I’m sure that, in the right place and time, transparency effects of Liquid Glass can be visually pleasing. Not only is this the wrong time and place, but those with visual impairment can no longer remove or even reduce these effects, as...

A thoughful moment in Buttondown. Gmail’s truncation has been going on for decades, and I have no idea why they still do this. Even the overflow interface for a truncated email is awful – the rest of it doesn’t appear in situ, but it opens a new window that where you have to start from the top. So it’s nice that...

One thing I really admired in earlier versions of Windows was the thing that was also its weak point: the keyboard orientation. I miss the old tradition in Windows where many commands had underlined letters, and you could simply press Alt and that letter to jump to it: If I remember correctly, eventually this got...

In iOS, I like how cropping quietly snaps to things that look like borders, with gentle haptics, without announcing anything: #details #direct manipulation #interface design #ios #touch

A funny 12-minute video by Chris Spargo about why traffic signs in the world are standardized only to some extent. This was interesting to me generally in the context of Europe being more iconographic, and America being more “word-y” in their sign design, which extends to devices, keyboards, and (presumably?)...

I am starting to collect all the problems I routinely find in Finder. I can think of ~15 off the top of my head; maybe this will turn into an essay of sorts. I hope this isn’t too boring for you. Sometimes Finder takes a really long time to update the list of files after something changed it. All my screenshots go...