It’s time to celebrate a little win.
The other day, my mom contacted me saying her 10-year-old iPhone wouldn’t turn on.
After getting a hold of the device and doing some family IT support, I concluded the battery was dead.
So I bought her a new (old) one on Walmart (SE 3rd g...
Here’s Dave Rupert writing about all those emails, texts, phone calls, etc. we’re getting these days:
Once upon a time it had utility, now it’s all noise and grifter slop demanding our attention and giving us to-dos
That last part really hit: “giving us to-dos”.
I feel thi...
I’ve mentioned before my interest in the history and development of nuclear weapons.
Currently, I’m reading The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner by Daniel Ellsberg (of Pentagon Papers renown).
In the first chapter, Ellsberg talks about his time working ...
Have you heard the good news? I bemoaned the approach of putting an icon in every menu item by default which shipped with macOS Tahoe — but now it’s gone in Golden Gate!
John Gruber wrote about this reversion back in June, including the fact that Apple’s new Human Interface ...
From where I sit, figuring out what to build, building it, and shipping it are all part of the art of making software.
Many disciplines have emerged through the years to facilitate this work: product, design, engineering, devops, etc.
We need all these disciplines to make gr...
I wrote the chapter on app icon history for The iOS App Icon Book.
The other day I found an old note stashed away where I had started researching the macOS version of that chapter (which Michael ultimately ended up writing).
At the time, I didn’t know what to write. I mean, how do you write a history of icon design for the Mac? It’s rich!
To get my creative juices flowing, I started by researching the different docks in macOS through the years and compiled them all into a single graphic (big shout out to this compilation of images on 512 Pixels).
I just wanted to preserve and archive that image. Check out the high-res version here.
That’s it, that’s the post.
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Bluesky
Pete Millspaugh has a lovely article over on WIRED that peers into the world of domains. (If you’re as interested in the esoteric details of domains as I am, follow Pete’s writing at Dot Com Press.)
You should just read the article, but here are a few things that stood out t...
My notes from this talk by Alexander Petros at Big Sky DevCon 2026.
Alex starts by noting how “modernize” used to mean something along the lines of “update this thing that was made before I was born”. But now “modernize” means something more like “update this thing from 5-10...
Louie Mantia has a great post about how app icons are converging towards the squircle on iOS and macOS.
His post reads like a history. If you’re wondering, “How did we get to a place where all app icons are becoming squircles?” Mantia’s post answers that question by starting...
That’s something Ben Thompson said a recent episode of Dithering. He was referring to how he felt while trying to help his mom get control of her digital life. Everything was just too hard and convoluted and he felt embarrassed as someone who works in tech.
That very same evening, I randomly got this text from a family member.
I hear this a lot from family and friends who sit outside tech.
“Nothing works.”
“Everything is hard to use.”
“I can’t make sense of this.”
And to them I am a representative, a connection, to this pain in their lives.
And I, too, am embarrassed on behalf of the tech industry — by our collective failure.
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Bluesky
Marques Brownlee just released a video essay titled “Dear YouTube”.
I loved it.
He talks about how YouTube is going to start shipping this new feature where makers can essentially publish different “variants” of their videos and see which performs best (an A/B test).
Which ...
Confession: I got nerd-sniped by Sam Henri Gold’s request for my icon galleries:
I'd like to humbly request artwork-level searching in macosicongallery.com
What follows is a train-of-thought blog post as I play with what an implementation might look like.
I’ve actually lo...
So there I am reading Unsung when I come across this quote from Jef Raskin:
An interface is humane if it is responsive to human needs and considerate of human frailties.
This articulation perfectly captures why I recoil at modern “growth tactics” in user interfaces and experiences: they are designed to exploit human frailties, not be considerate of them.
Stated again: a humane interface — or a humane system, even a humane technology — is considerate of human frailties. It acknowledges they exist and works with them, rather than taking advantage of them.
Humane technology does not rely on impulse, addiction, or imposition to survive.
It survives purely on the free choice of its user.
You choose to use it because you have the freedom not to.
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Whenever a new version of macOS drops, I find myself archiving the new app icons for my macOS icon gallery.
In the past, the work to do this was a bit tedious.
First, I’d find the app in the “Applications” folder (or elsewhere on the Mac), right click and choose “Get Info”:
...
I was listening to the episode “Make Your Own Thing” from the Off Protocol podcast where Jim Ray interviews John Gruber.
They cover a variety of topics, including Gruber’s thoughts on the dilution of personal brand by publishing through “chain” platforms like Substack (I qu...
I made a note of it, but Bryan Cantrill wrote a post about the ex-Anthropic employee who pegged the probability of AI killing humanity in the next decade at >10%.
The article is a good one and you should read it, but what I want to capture here is a side story from Cantri...
John Gruber makes his picks for the iPhone Hall of Fame:
iPhone (original)
iPhone 4
iPhone 5S
iPhone X
iPhone 17 Pro
Ok, my turn. Here’s my iPhone Hall of Fame:
iPhone (original)
iPhone 4
iPhone X
iPhone 12 Mini
iPod Touch
Notes:
How do you not put the OG iPhone at th...
“Artificial” things can get a bad rap next to their counterparts, but they have their place.
For example, artificial light (i.e. not from the sun)? Super useful, especially at night.
And when it comes to skiing, I’ll take artificial snow if I have to. Beats no snow.
Artific...
Poor bottlenecks. Always seen as problematic, antithetical to efficiency.
But bottlenecks aren’t universally bad.
Think about it: a bottle’s neck is designed to constrain the amount of liquid that can flow out. A decrease in bandwidth is its entire purpose! Otherwise an over...
I’ve got Netlify Analytics turned on for a few of my websites.
I use it send myself a little daily digest that alerts me when folks link to my writing, be it an individual sending me a few referrals, a newsletter sending me a few hundred, or Hacker News sending me thousands....
A URL is a technical thing: a hostname, a path, a port, an origin, some query parameters, etc.
But a link is a cultural thing: an invitation, a citation, a gift, a shortcut, a connection.
All from a simple idea: here’s a thing that points to another thing, off you go!
We’ve ...
Speaking of being on the internet and finding things that make you go, “Hey! It’s not just me!” I scrolled across this skeet from Tyler Gaw:
I just dug to the bottom of my Big Box of Cables to find two cables that I needed for something. They've been in the bottom for 10+ y...
Marcin Wichary has a lovely article titled “Photoshop’s challenges with focus, pt. 2”. If you’re into the minutiae of interface design, this is a good ‘un. It perfectly illustrates how impossible it is to try and compare two interfaces side by side as static images.
What mat...
I was reading Jason Gorman’s article “The Wall Confronting Reliable Coding Agent Autonomy” and he says:
the journey from 90% to 99% reliability is just as hard as it was to get to 90%. And from 99% to 99.9% is just as hard again.
This stood out, as I’ve been experiencing m...
Speaking of things we know individually, but let slide collectively, here’s Jeremy Keith talking about how we all used Flash:
Remember when almost every website had a Flash intro? Everyone knew they were annoying and uneccessary, but everyone else was doing it.
And here’s ...
Eric Bailey has a fun little post about how we need more than a few icons to express the nuance of our shared human experience.
For example, he suggests Netflix provide some feedback buttons to indicate the kinds of experiences we all share consuming and rating media:
“Just...
807 blog posts across 14 years.
That’s how much I’ve published on my blog at the time of this writing.
And here’s the question I’ve been turning over in my mind: “How do I convey that kind of volume across time in a more interesting way than a mere reverse-chronological list...
Dave Rupert wrote about shipping microlighter: a tool for handling syntax highlighting using the CSS Custom Highlights API. I saw his post the day he released it, and I had an implementation PR up for my blog by end of day.
Then, like I do with so many things, I let it sit t...
On my icon gallery sites, I have metadata I’ve manually added over the years to tag certain icons as being predominantly “blue” or “orange” or some other color.
Then I use this metadata to present icons of (roughly) the same color. It’s kinda neat to be able to browse a wall...
In his talk “Why AI Is Breaking Software Security As We Know It” (my notes here), Feross Aboukhadijeh talks about the Axios npm incident and how the maintainer got phished by succumbing to (amongst other things) a faux Microsoft Teams interface:
this is the kind of thing th...
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