The Curious Engineer

All blogs / Software / engineering practice

Unsung

unsung.aresluna.org

A blog about software craft and quality

Software / engineering practiceApple / classic MacComputing history

Posts
612 from 1 Jun 2014 to 7 Nov 2026
Posting
about daily (606 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://unsung.aresluna.org/feed.xml

2026 567

  1. Crammed and dangerous
  2. When fonts fall
  3. Mailbag: Modular industrial dashboards
  4. “Everybody loves a good underdog story.”
  5. Internet Archive’s alphabet
  6. Gmail’s typable labels
  7. Pac-Man’s siren call
  8. “This wasn’t a thoughtfully designed menu.”
  9. “In the middle of the game, slowly and surely wiggle the cartridge.”
  10. “An unnamed arcade in some sleepy suburb of Portland”
  11. “That’s how birds fly in my nightmares from now on.”
  12. “Once you get yourself into this situation, it’s hard to get out.”
  13. For love (of typography)
  14. “After many years of faithful service, the magic switch now sits in disgrace on a counter somewhere.”
  15. “Players are still trying to find the alternate reality that might be hidden underneath.”
  16. “All these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided.”
  17. “A lot of internet man-hours have gone into figuring out what, or who, is behind them.”
  18. “R.I.P. Zeus 2020–2020”
  19. November 22, 1963
  20. A set of rectangles getting exponentially angrier, too
  21. “Dear Human”
  22. Book review: The Cuckoo’s Egg
  23. “Miss you, Tom.”
  24. “I found an innocent loop that had no test in it.”
  25. The Swiss Cheese model, pt. 4: The iPhone jump scare
  26. “For the first several seconds, there would have been little to suggest that anything was wrong.”
  27. My first visit to New York Cities
  28. “You hold down Control, Shift, Alt, and click Technical Support. And boom.”
  29. “If you’re still using Popcorn Time, we think it’s time to move on.”
  30. “Scaring the daylights out of unsuspecting users”
  31. “As user-friendly as a cactus”
  32. Mailbag: October 2026
  33. Rough and smooth around the edges
  34. Before pixels: Speed-Minder
  35. “No results” doesn’t mean “no results,” pt. 1
  36. “Because most users do not use dates before March 1, 1900, this problem is rare.”
  37. “We find many users write to us in a spirit of collaboration.”
  38. Obsessive about obfuscation
  39. Motor, motor memory
  40. “We all hope you have a great week, even if you never buy a Playdate.”
  41. “Hindered by its headline feature”
  42. “In every study that considered the question”
  43. “Traditional, but puzzling”
  44. “No standard format for writing data to these tapes”
  45. “Is clip art actually dead?”
  46. The distance between ⌘8 and ⌘9
  47. “Both of these games have had their heydays and then both went astray a bit.”
  48. “They take time. Put in the time.”
  49. “I’m ready to throw up at any moment.”
  50. The beautiful, quiet power of motor memory
  51. “A platform that for 30 years was considered unreachable”
  52. “They take one look at the UI and abandon it.”
  53. Subtitles on demand
  54. Deeper dive: Keyboard differences between Windows and Macs
  55. Playdate’s update interface takes charge
  56. “Konami looked at its restrictions and designed an entire level based around it.”
  57. Safari and system design, pt. 3
  58. Limitations of magic
  59. GUIdebook and other GUI stories
  60. “I don’t know why this is so hard.”
  61. “Yeah… I was very tired that night.”
  62. “But it would have bothered us the rest of our lives.”
  63. “I mean, nobody should buy this device right now.”
  64. “I was just searching for a bookshelf.”
  65. “Signs I would see on metal doors and transformer boxes”
  66. “Have conviction in what you want to share with the world.”
  67. The left hand should know what the right hand is doing
  68. A hacker’s guide to bending the universe
  69. Before pixels: Modular industrial dashboards
  70. Book review: What Can A Body Do?
  71. Arc’s good keyboard shortcuts
  72. A loading state within a loading state
  73. “I’m especially proud of the 1e+9 duration.”
  74. “First, don’t interfere with user input.”
  75. “But it looks like a lot less work than we had to do.”
  76. “I didn’t know about this shortcut until recently.”
  77. “Hey, this isn’t your father’s 737.”
  78. “Apple has developed an unexpected workaround.”
  79. “I want to release it, even if the quality would be a little lower.”
  80. Interesting web design moments
  81. “This also introduces new questions.”
  82. YNAB’s pocket change
  83. Who undoes the undoers
  84. “I love it because it’s a bit messy, and not everything lines up perfectly.”
  85. CleanShot’s bulldozed settings
  86. Key symbols we lost to time, pt. 2: The Mac side
  87. My design bookshelves
  88. an interactive representation of my design bookshelves
  89. “Insert your favorite nursery rhyme.”
  90. “59.94Hz is standard on televisions in North America.”
  91. Not everything needs to be a round rect
  92. “But, as we all know, the individual light bulbs are not moving.”
  93. “Tuned to the particular typing mistakes to which Teitelman was prone”
  94. AI policy
  95. “Redesigned callouts to be less visually chaotic.”
  96. “Act now, apologize later”
  97. Nova’s menu wayfinding
  98. “Sweet, a whole website of video game menus”
  99. Key symbols we lost to time, pt. 1: The PC side
  100. Fingers don’t look around
  101. “A great look at the destructive power of an uncaught Infinity value”
  102. Anthony Hobday’s design references
  103. DaisyDisk’s onboarding
  104. Unsung Heroes: Super Sprint
  105. “…and at that point it stops being a system.”
  106. Ivory’s account switching
  107. Responsive text and code
  108. Don’t show again (Taylor’s version)
  109. Got your back, pt. 8
  110. Unsung @ 500: Behind the scenes
  111. Unsung @ 500: Nine design details
  112. Unsung @ 500: The new design
  113. “I would be very happy to see all kinds of text editors adopt this.”
  114. Windows does it better, pt. 3: Cut in File Explorer
  115. “A tricky problem I had to be thoughtful about.”
  116. The secrets of your menus
  117. The Swiss Cheese model, pt. 3
  118. “You can always click on the mirror icon to turn it into… a mirror.”
  119. “This was not the first time the European Commission had attempted to correct for the permissions pollution.”
  120. “I just chose words carefully.”
  121. “We want it to really confuse people, but also really make people happy.”
  122. “An absolute bare minimum of interactivity”
  123. “They had no concept of a duty of care to their users.”
  124. “This time, there had to be a different ending.”
  125. Medium’s writerly favicons
  126. Let me walk around
  127. Two previews for the price of one
  128. Mark MacKay’s explainers
  129. “This way, the interface does not get in the way.”
  130. “This would result in some serious street cred and respect.”
  131. Testing tip: Make your keyboard fast
  132. “A quick internet search should provide you with step-by-step instructions.”
  133. YouTube’s right click relay
  134. Movie review: General Magic
  135. Zalgo: The good, the bad, and the very, very ugly
  136. Got your back, pt. 7
  137. “The ghosts are fast and they don’t turn blue.”
  138. The Swiss Cheese model, pt. 2
  139. The item vs. the position
  140. “Behind their simplistic behavior is a fairly elegant system.”
  141. “I think there’s a lot of value in these.”
  142. “If nothing happened, you probably did not press the button quickly enough the second time.”
  143. Deeper dive: Were Touch Bar’s problems software rather than hardware?
  144. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often tiles
  145. “What actually happened was the birth of a genre in digital graphics.”
  146. Name pronunciation in Asana
  147. Tap to top: Ivory
  148. Tap to top: Bear
  149. A bug becoming a feature (1972 edition)
  150. Linear’s visual key feedback
  151. “If you aim for the king, you better not show up eight years late.”
  152. Arno Beck’s art
  153. “I want to code; I’m not looking to make lifestyle choices.”
  154. iPod’s circular apps
  155. The first notch is magical
  156. Seeing like a state
  157. “Solving a largely imaginary user goal”
  158. “Microsoft’s most ambitious attempt to reinvent the start screen”
  159. Xcode’s clever minimap
  160. “It’s unclear how Sopwith escaped to the general public.”
  161. When commit means cancel
  162. “Some guy named Paul”
  163. “As a Windows user, it’s a very surreal way to install a program.”
  164. Asana’s fascinating Tab shortcuts
  165. The monkey lives again
  166. You only get one chance to make a zeroth impression
  167. One and one thing only
  168. “Insights and ideas emerge from that interface.”
  169. “Next up? You know it. You hate it. It’s the invisible wall.”
  170. “This is a sphere getting exponentially angrier as time passes.”
  171. “Gravity is worth asking about.”
  172. “Rather than fighting my tendency to type these two characters in my omnibar, I neutralized it.”
  173. What it says on the tin
  174. In between the lines
  175. “Every now and then some Unicode hyphen character makes its way into comments.”
  176. Meta on meta and Meta
  177. A time machine in Logic Pro
  178. “A vicious circle of incompatibility”
  179. Chrome’s breaking and entering
  180. “Creativity is fundamentally not an efficiency problem.”
  181. Safari and system design, pt. 2
  182. “Jokes, art projects, or cruel and unusual punishment”
  183. Unsung Heroes: Repeat in Excel 97
  184. “Something seems to be going crucially wrong with the frame rate.”
  185. Five moments in snapping history
  186. “Try quickly typing 1+2+3. I bet you won’t get 6.”
  187. “Is this acceptable? Not really. Is it understandable? Absolutely.”
  188. “Maze of pages, redirects, and confirmation emails”
  189. The Swiss Cheese model, pt. 1
  190. text.makeup
  191. “No such thing as too fast”
  192. A good kind of an update: The responses
  193. “It would’ve been much simpler to just use an animated cigar.”
  194. Max one weird thing
  195. Sets of overlapping circles
  196. “Cursed knowledge we have learned that we wish we never knew.”
  197. “If HEIC has no haters I’m dead.”
  198. More absolutely strange Google shortcuts
  199. Flickr’s optimistic committing
  200. My one (1) Medium secret
  201. “Animating something and animating something well are two very different things.”
  202. “Not being good at something doesn’t mean you can’t love it.”
  203. “…or I could click seventy buttons.”
  204. The adjective of the present or the verb of the future
  205. A good kind of an update?
  206. “Nothing at all like the bloated app that Dropbox’s Mac client has grown into”
  207. An accident inside an accident
  208. “Relying on passengers to open the doors proved to be a bit of a curse.”
  209. The great release notes of BBEdit
  210. “If you never saw the words Game Over, did you really do it all?”
  211. About Unsung: Recent improvements
  212. “You are a printer we are all printers”
  213. Balls (practically) to the wall
  214. If you’re a button, you have one job
  215. “The root of all margin-collapsing evil”
  216. “I know you think I’ve lost my mind, but trust me.”
  217. A simple notification preview in Retro
  218. Finder’s elite eliding
  219. Make the logo^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hsomething bigger
  220. “That’s a big number – by almost any scale other than Google’s.”
  221. “No one knows who patient zero was.”
  222. “The evilest will-breaking browser game to exist.”
  223. “Invalid-reverse-solidus validation error”
  224. Mailbag: The curious case of the disappearing Polish S
  225. ¿Por qué no los dos? pt. 1
  226. “Felt a bit like sorcery.”
  227. “Icons that are iconic”
  228. The curious case of the disappearing Polish S
  229. Noise as information and information as noise
  230. Frozen in time
  231. I was wrong about Duff’s device
  232. “If you can’t stand by a feature, you shouldn’t launch it.”
  233. “It’s like a Freudian slip simulator.”
  234. Good renewal comms from Panic
  235. The MacCharlie Method
  236. Fingers already on the keyboard
  237. “Ketchup is next, which is similar in construction to the mustard.”
  238. “Playing through it felt like reading a love letter.”
  239. “Something that probably bothered us more than anyone.”
  240. Windows does it better, pt. 2
  241. “That knowledge slides away.”
  242. “It’s about squeezing more out of everything.”
  243. “Don’t entangle emulators in infringement events that are visible from space.”
  244. “It’s rare that printing nothing at all is the best default behavior.”
  245. Paste And Match Style is not the answer
  246. Show your hands honor for the strange power they bring you
  247. “I kept getting trophies and was wondering how that was possible in a demo.”
  248. Clicking, fast and slow
  249. I can’t stop watching Bret Victor’s talks
  250. Fontificator
  251. Panic’s blog respects its own history
  252. “The little details he’d missed became obvious.”
  253. “They had the simplest task in the world.”
  254. Not slow and not steady
  255. “Big, fast, careless swipes”
  256. “Update announcements are most likely to appear at the least convenient time.”
  257. “Must hate yourself to submit”
  258. “This is my favorite news from all of WWDC this week.”
  259. The trouble with font previews
  260. Got your back, pt. 6
  261. “Imagine being a pixel on an old Pac-Man game.”
  262. “I’ve lost entire sentences of text to this incompetent implementation.”
  263. “I am skeptical it achieves what Apple intends.”
  264. “Each one of these buttons has four distinct purposes.”
  265. Book review: Steve Jobs in Exile
  266. “Artifacts from a strange moment”
  267. Face with symbols over mouth, apparently
  268. “-4.5° rather than -45°?”
  269. More molly guards
  270. “Then suddenly we were boring, bloated, and not particularly interesting.”
  271. Good type against all odds
  272. Three good interactive explainers
  273. A mixed blessing
  274. “Whoever is doing this had some fun with adding these portions.”
  275. Writing about fonts
  276. See you on the other side
  277. “In a world of unresponsive 911 calls, it is the 912 that actually works.”
  278. “Nemo? That’s a nice name.”
  279. “The broken, slapdash, bed-shitting end to one of the most iconic franchises in all of gaming history”
  280. Shift & ⌥ & Splat & ⎋ Escape
  281. The surprising richness of GarageBand
  282. “The pipeline of future experts is thinning from both ends.”
  283. “It took months to find appliances that didn’t need apps to function.”
  284. Day for night
  285. “But obviously, that’s just silly stuff.”
  286. Within or without
  287. A few interesting modern pixel fonts
  288. Google Docs shortcut onboarding
  289. FAIL_MAIL_OVER_500_MILES=TRUE
  290. “Why pay for an orchestra when your computer can do it all?”
  291. Deeper dive: Lisa’s copy (and cut, and paste)
  292. “This is a common tell in web apps, and we did a lot of work to eliminate it.”
  293. Chrome’s abnormal tab search
  294. “Some say it sounds like an alto saxophone.”
  295. Shallow breathing
  296. “If you just ignore those pesky impossible details, the demo looks deceptively simple.”
  297. “Accents are an opportunity, not a burden.”
  298. Less doesn’t need more
  299. “Easy to use,” the hard parts
  300. “We accepted this gradual bloat, but that’s not progress.”
  301. Safari and system design, pt. 1
  302. “193 hours of attempts (and practice)”
  303. Not a radio pharma ad
  304. “Cryptic mode was born from a hard constraint.”
  305. Speaking of wiggling the mouse
  306. “This is where your mouse becomes a cryptographic instrument.”
  307. Mailbag: Photoshop’s focus post
  308. Rug pulled
  309. Save For Web claws
  310. “Nothing short of a magic trick”
  311. “They did the bare minimum and moved on.”
  312. A preview of the future
  313. Peaked in 2015
  314. “There seems to be a file that is just filled with undecipherable Morse.”
  315. “This was a user-friendly computer.”
  316. “Watchmaker’s delicate precision and ornate mechanical intent”
  317. “Traditionally, fonts were just shapes.”
  318. “Who thinks about a screwdriver?”
  319. The land where time stood still
  320. The vision of persistence
  321. The 1990s called and they want their dialog box back
  322. “Have you ever been annoyed by your Mac’s media keys?”
  323. Early names
  324. Mouse pointer as a mere mortal
  325. “Examining the changelog in its entirety would be a massive task, given that it was now over 200,000 words long.”
  326. CleanShot’s onboarding via settings
  327. The tortoise and the hare live on
  328. “The Helvetica of music notation”
  329. Photoshop’s challenges with focus, pt. 2
  330. About Unsung: Thanks for your feedback!
  331. Book review: Shadow of the Colossus (Boss Fight Books)
  332. UI art from 4096
  333. Tactical dark modes
  334. What deserves a second chance
  335. “The cheatsheet you won’t need.”
  336. “That’s how floating point errors and triangle numbers solved a mystery.”
  337. “Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay.”
  338. Abort, Retry, No, Thanks
  339. “The deeper you look, the more it starts to feel like a platform.”
  340. Out of touch
  341. Recency bias (non-derogatory)
  342. “You could key smash, and it would type out the thing.”
  343. “The fancy software figures it out for you.”
  344. Got your back, pt. 5
  345. If a feature falls in a forest
  346. “The system is so twisted that even Apple itself begs for these reviews from its own apps.”
  347. “It can be really disorienting to scroll around a fully monochrome hexdump.”
  348. Raycast’s confetti cannon
  349. The edge not taken
  350. “Area connected to a given node in a multi-dimensional array with some matching attribute”
  351. “Use links, don’t talk about them.”
  352. Unsung @ 250: Please send me your feedback!
  353. Unsung @ 250: Nine design details
  354. Unsung @ 250: Goals and principles
  355. “To build a thing that immediately feels like you’ve had it forever is very hard to do.”
  356. “Should be no trouble at all for a driver to understand.”
  357. Thoughtful file dropping in Wakamaifondue
  358. “Rather than trying to fix this mistake, the developers leaned into it hard in the sequel.”
  359. The beauty and the terror of oddly-specific commands
  360. “We can have the best of all worlds.”
  361. In search for a more precise cursor
  362. “Deere charges six figures for a tractor. But the farmers were still the product.”
  363. Is this the latest?
  364. “So I wrote a script that takes monthly screenshots of Google and Apple Maps.”
  365. Only time will tell
  366. “Approximately 21 times the estimated age of the universe”
  367. “We’re trying to copy this old machine, weirdness and all.”
  368. “Software is a unique art because it is so reactive.”
  369. Blink comparators in photo editing apps
  370. “Prototyping turned into an excuse for not thinking”
  371. “Every step they take, in every single direction, is right on top of a rake.”
  372. “Subtle line between animations that help and animations that hurt”
  373. Why do Macs ask you to press random keys when connecting a new keyboard?
  374. “And if I were to end this story here, this would be a great story.”
  375. “If you use your computer to do important work, you deserve fast software.”
  376. “It moved too slowly to be an asteroid.”
  377. Linear’s clever internal redesign UI
  378. “I’m hoping that the listeners out there, when they hear it, they’ll feel seen.”
  379. For your consideration: Tab to fix spelling
  380. Anachronisms
  381. Testing tip: Enable the zoom peek gesture
  382. Book review: Maintenance: Of Everything (Part One)
  383. “Naïve, simple, not good enough.”
  384. “There is no quality or historical significance standard.”
  385. World-class female singers
  386. “That’s because the metro cab is his right hand. Videogames!”
  387. “Decentralization does not always equal delight.”
  388. Come at the king, you best not miss
  389. “Less of a pitch, more of a prediction”
  390. Got your back, pt. 4
  391. On tools and toolmaking
  392. To streamline or not to streamline
  393. System shock
  394. Some more placeholder misuse
  395. “Publishers aren’t evil, but they are desperate.”
  396. Bear’s seamless OCR integration
  397. Two nice moments from MoMA in New York
  398. “It takes an airplane to bring out the worst in a pilot.”
  399. “This thing that Tamron’s doing is actually very cool.”
  400. “So, what makes 3D so scary and different?”
  401. One big step forward, three small steps back
  402. “I don’t like it but at least I know. Thanks.”
  403. “Michael here will handle the bullshitting.”
  404. Design is more
  405. The curse of the cursor
  406. User interface sugar crash
  407. “And to make matters worse, complexity sells better.”
  408. “I like to use Soviet control panels as a starting point.”
  409. Night mode predictions
  410. Photoshop’s challenges with focus, pt. 1
  411. “Just because it’s consistent doesn’t mean it’s consistently right.”
  412. Adjust in smaller steps
  413. “Why do we care about numbers? Numbers make me mad.”
  414. “Their attitudes about the issues still shifted.”
  415. Thirteen characters
  416. “We’re going to start out by going to the FAKEY folder.”
  417. “Juggling my phone, my camera, and the umbrella, having to tap the wet screen multiple times to get anything done”
  418. Software proprioception
  419. “A few small details I use to make my interfaces feel better.”
  420. “Houston, we have 1 problem(s).”
  421. “Two lights that you never want to see when you’re landing on the Moon.”
  422. From dawn (or dusk) till dusk (or dawn)
  423. My essay about the Fn key
  424. 🌐 Globe/Fn key
  425. “Durial321 is a banned RuneScape player and a bug abuser.”
  426. “It’s beautiful and kind of mesmerizing.”
  427. “When you make a release that’s okay”
  428. “Kapor had projected first year sales of $1M, but did $53M instead.”
  429. “Make a tiny box that fits around your F1 key.”
  430. “There’s something about it that can’t be objectively measured: It’s funny.”
  431. “I’m obviously taking a risk here by advertising emoji directly.”
  432. A more eager typeahead in Chrome
  433. Not a mountain – but not a molehill, either
  434. “Which is definitely not good to do to it.”
  435. “Podcasts are a radical gift.”
  436. Lock Scroll With a Vengeance
  437. “Your wife’s new legal name is TAARGÜS TAARGÜS.”
  438. “Every time there’s a massive technological shift, intellectual property rights suddenly and very conveniently become a blind spot.”
  439. Deterministic vs. idempotent
  440. “A day some have predicted and many have feared”
  441. “Designed to be loveable by managers”
  442. Tales of direct manipulation, pt. 1
  443. “Simultaneously old-fashioned and futuristic at the same time”
  444. “Our programs are fun to use.”
  445. “Some are papercuts, others a throbbing migraine.”
  446. “Some rather obscure and complex mathematical process”
  447. “It’s not so simple to celebrate a phrase.”
  448. Accidental UI calming
  449. “So long I’m showing it sideways”
  450. Safari release notes
  451. “It’s very small, but still leaves room for creativity.”
  452. Living in the Upside Down
  453. “Please star to express your interest.”
  454. Sins of our Finders, pt. 5
  455. “Just a little detail that wouldn’t sell anything”
  456. Got your back, pt. 3
  457. I’m with stupid →
  458. “I trust in TextEdit.”
  459. “One of the smaller but downright disturbing issues with dark mode”
  460. Tactical version history
  461. “They even thanked the coders for giving them such a difficult challenge.”
  462. “So, I made another tool.”
  463. “Repeat until smooth”
  464. Mailbag: URLs as UI
  465. “These platforms are ad-heavy to the detriment and frustration of users, yet they remain successful and growing.”
  466. Trust your fingers
  467. Make yourself at home
  468. “The reason this never caused a problem before was pure luck.”
  469. Unsung Heroes: Flickr’s URLs scheme
  470. “A design variation that doesn’t make sense”
  471. Book review: The iOS App Icon Book/The macOS App Icon Book
  472. “We internalize so much by doing things slower and making mistakes.”
  473. “The killer app is making calls.”
  474. “Problem solved, right? Well, not exactly.”
  475. Molly guard in reverse
  476. How to make sure a designer never files a bug again
  477. “It’s just a nice thing to have, you know.”
  478. “Hello... I am right here!!!”
  479. “4 billion unique (and sometimes very memorable) sentences”
  480. “Projects just drift toward chaos unless a person is actively holding them together.”
  481. “Maintenance in this larger sense has nothing optional about it.”
  482. “This sounds completely impractical and we love it.”
  483. “See the picture of some guy in place of the X button?”
  484. “These small, repeated experiences shape us more than we like to admit.”
  485. “You’d get knuckle pain if you typed too much.”
  486. “Battered, bedraggled, inexplicably enthusiastic about a bargain flight to Bermuda”
  487. “A demake of a remake of a demake of a game that is ostensibly a semi-sequel/semi-adaptation”
  488. The dusty menus of the world’s most popular desktop browser
  489. “A number of hidden problems in the naïve approach”
  490. “A collection of beautiful letters? A beautiful collection of letters? You decide.”
  491. “It’s a good idea though, and there aren’t even many of those in Tahoe.”
  492. “The floppy disk icon relies on interface familiarity, not object familiarity.”
  493. How to shoot a screen using a board of keys
  494. “Users were gleefully told to reload the game.”
  495. Testing tip: Always show scrollbars
  496. “How do they spit in Korea?”
  497. Three iOS 26 transitions
  498. “State-sanctioned monster executions over a server hiccup”
  499. “As the vision decays or blurs and new features are conceived without consideration of the whole”
  500. The Moylan Arrow of software
  501. “If you did it right, it looks like it was effortless”
  502. “An integer overflow causes an enemy to spawn directly on top of the player”
  503. “The autocorrect battle of wills”
  504. Sins of our Finders, pt. 4: Eject
  505. “1H in a config menu = 10C”
  506. “We can go deeper by patterning inside of our pattern”
  507. “Stuck on level 256 forever”
  508. “Coding typography is not like any other kind of typography.”
  509. “I do not want to tell you about my recent experience.”
  510. “I’m a shame-driven developer.”
  511. “Every Mac’s floppy disk had a garbage name”
  512. Movie review: Koolhaas Houselife
  513. The modern powers of ten
  514. “We made it be ok by being bored and fixing stuff”
  515. “A masterclass in Interaction Design (IxD)”
  516. A good person to follow: David Aerne
  517. “The glossy, shimmering future of computing”
  518. “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”
  519. “Distinct absence of anything that takes away screen real-estate”
  520. “Intentional pagination is progress with awareness”
  521. “The archive itself is not new”
  522. “8–10 hours per symbol”
  523. “8–10 hours per symbol”
  524. Favourite well-made apps and sites
  525. Out of sight
  526. “A hand-wave toward something ineffable”
  527. “Fourth reason: Map makers are lazy”
  528. “Because you haven’t used them recently”
  529. A Japanese word for “cat”
  530. “I’m still grumpy that Apple discontinued it back in 2015”
  531. “Dwarf children die from embarrassment at not being dressed at age 2”
  532. “If you put the Apple icons in reverse”
  533. A nice transit detail
  534. “Before I knew it, I had four damaged sockets and three bad cables.”
  535. “An extremely minor technical problem”
  536. “This glitch didn’t want to be forgotten.”
  537. Designing table of contents
  538. Slow, fast, third thing
  539. Death of the bedroom coder
  540. Making repetitive things less tedious
  541. Book review: Enshittification
  542. “A lot of nice little touches in UI design go unnoticed”
  543. “Everything possible to make this website as fast as they can”
  544. “All comes down to one pixel”
  545. “A gesture that feels unnatural and unintuitive”
  546. “The only way to win was to cheat.”
  547. “An email to the wrong Larry”
  548. Sins of our Finders, pt. 3
  549. Amiga Pointer Archive
  550. TV show review: Mr. Bates Vs. The Post Office
  551. In stereo, where available
  552. “Every time user pressed Enter at a frozen interface screen”
  553. Fonts have bugs, too
  554. A new (old) kind of keyboard
  555. “It’s hard to do a drive-by on your feet.”
  556. A clever disambiguation detail
  557. Fav tech museums
  558. “And they can’t even agree on the direction of an arrow.”
  559. Fun interface on my bike
  560. “Just 3 days before the deadline, I discovered something horrible.”
  561. Remember me?
  562. Book review: Laws of UX (2nd ed.)
  563. Sins of our Finders, pt. 2
  564. “I was inspired by the Comic Sans typeface”
  565. “Christmas lights diarrhea”
  566. A tale of two import windows
  567. “Accidents dropped to zero overnight.”

2025 40

  1. “Confusing, distracting, and aesthetically upsetting”
  2. Got your back, pt. 2
  3. A tiny bit old Windows got right
  4. A nice moment in screenshotting on iOS
  5. “And waited for the rest of the world to catch up. And waited.”
  6. Sins of our Finders, pt. 1
  7. “Moms talking like demons, tough guys talking like little girls”
  8. “Type is not rubber”
  9. Buoyant, Dreamer, Reflected
  10. “The chance was just 1 in 85.”
  11. Book review: Pilgrim in the microworld
  12. “Because it didn’t look crappy enough”
  13. Fitts’s Law at 20
  14. “More or less turned Windows into a carnival”
  15. “Strangely primitive against the backdrop of the slick user interface”
  16. Fav error message
  17. “Expressed in a single picture”
  18. The original loading state
  19. Got your back
  20. “In my greatest hour of need, where were you”
  21. “The focus on optimization was a time-limited social fact.”
  22. “They’re just ugly fonts.”
  23. “Kinda love this error message on the bus”
  24. “It was fun and I learned a lot.”
  25. “The internet is wrong, and I am here to set it right.”
  26. “This cognitive load is invisible and rarely discussed.”
  27. Really into keyboards
  28. “Every aspect of the machine operates as quickly as the user can move.”
  29. “Apple abandons its own guidance.”
  30. “How can I delete and add to library at the same time”
  31. “Ugly in a way that’s pretty”
  32. ⌘-P ⌘-S
  33. “OK cool now we can ship the game phew. But why did this EVER work?”
  34. “Especially helpful during live shows”
  35. “And then the system crashes”
  36. “Never criminalize pride in craft.”
  37. “More nuanced, more expert, interaction design skills”
  38. “Fight my way through it all again”
  39. I wrote about it once
  40. Frame of preference

2021 1

  1. Num Lock

2016 1

  1. an essay I wrote in 2016

2015 1

  1. Ctrl+Alt-based shortcuts on Windows

2014 1

  1. city planning in the 1970s

Undated 1

  1. shows the shortcuts on tabs themselves