I am generally not a fan of typewritten art, because at some point it all starts to feel a bit same’y, and the gimmick of using a typewriter as a paintbrush wears off pretty quickly. But these drawings by German artist Arno Beck caught my attention, because it feels like they playfully remix three eras: overtyping...

Robin Sloan: I still use Sublime Text for all of my programming and all of my newsletter-ing. […] The app is simple and superfast; I have it set up exactly the way I like it […], and it’s difficult for me to imagine ever switching to anything else. Here is a piece of software as sturdy and obedient as a cast-iron...

iPhone’s home button and then the swipe up home gesture are so important and well done that they probably need to be covered as Unsung Heroes, but I wanted to mention something else today as we’re revisiting the whole “app icons in squircles” story (my most recent post + Louie Mantia’s post). The first iPhone in...

Some years ago, the inimitable channel Technology Connections posted a 17-minute video about the peculiar design quirk of ceiling and room fans – they usually order their options Off → High → Medium → Low rather than the more natural Off → Low → Medium → High. The video is a bit off topic for this channel, but check...

The post about the dark mode toggle reminded me of two similar things rattling in my brain. On the positive side, here’s a delightful interaction from macOS. I can easily maximize the window to take up half the screen, but the moment I start dragging it, it recalls and nicely restores itself to its original size:...

On her blog, Lea Verou makes a case that each user-facing website dark-mode toggle should only ever show two options, but in a smart way. The challenge is that any dark mode toggle needs to actually accommodate three options: dark, light, and the default “whatever the system says” (which can be always dark, always...

From Marton Barcza at TechAltar, a good 12-minute video analyzing what went wrong with the famed Live Tiles that Microsoft was pushing throughout most of the 2010s: Now, among Windows Phone fans the pervasive opinion is that Live Tiles have failed because Microsoft did a poor job with them, which I think is at least...

Minimaps are an interesting UI element because they often feel very exciting – something about things being small, or responsive, or maps just being cool? – but fail to actually be useful. I find minimaps for coding particularly tricky because, at least in my world, code all looks very much the same from far away....

Sopwith is a 1984 videogame made by David L. Clark for the original, seminal IBM PC model 5150. It sports the distinctive 4-color CGA palette and an equally distinctive PC speaker soundtrack. It’s also one of the oldest videogames still in active development, and I was surprised how enthralled I was learning about...

A strange thing happens when you press Enter on an empty item in a list in most text editors – the entire list item disappears: This feels counterintuitive. Isn’t Enter for committing and adding more things? Wouldn’t Backspace be the right key to press to break a list? Yes, and no. I am not sure who invented this...

An interesting 20-minute Config talk from the Instagram designer Rose McManus: It covers some of the same areas we recently talked about: diacritics and Polish S (and a fun video about English conventions from a while back), but it tackles them on a higher level. McManus talks about how people express themselves via...

Mac’s operating system has a peculiar way to install apps. An app typically arrives in a file with a .dmg extension (it stands for “disk image”; my brain always reads it as “damage”), which upon double clicking becomes a kind of a drive. You go inside the drive, and there is the app icon. But the journey isn’t over....