Ever used a website where you toggle from light mode to dark mode and the web site changes but the chrome around the browser doesn’t?
To illustrate, take a look at this capture of my blog on an iPhone. When you toggle the theme from light to dark, note how the website turns ...
Adam Silver has an article titled “Do you trust design advice from ChatGPT?” wherein he prompted the LLM:
How do you add hint text to radio buttons?
It gave various suggestions, each of which Adam breaks down.
Here’s an an example response from ChatGPT:
If you want the h...
I recently finished Carlo Rovelli’s book “The Order of Time” and, of course, had a few web-adjacent thoughts come to mind.
Who says lessons from physics can’t be applied to making software? (I know, nobody is actually dying on that hill.)
A Weakness of Being Data-Driven
Bei...
Web developers have been waiting years for traction in styling HTML form controls. Is it possible the day has come? Here’s Jen Simmons on Mastodon:
My team is working on a solution — you’ll apply appearance: base and switch to a new interoperable, consistent controls with e...
Heydon Pickering has an intriguing video dealing with the question: “Why is everything binary?” The gist of the video, to me, distills to this insight:
The idea that [everything] belongs to one of two archetypes is seductive in its simplicity, so we base everything that we ...
Here’s Gordon Brander in an article titled “Don't fork the ecosystem”:
Most of our software has been shaped by chance decisions made in haste by people who could not have predicted how the system would end up being used today.
And if we could rebuild those systems today, k...
And by LLMS I mean: (L)ots of (L)ittle ht(M)l page(S).
I recently shipped some updates to my blog. Through the design/development process, I had some insights which made me question my knee-jerk reaction to building pieces of a page as JS-powered interactions on top of the e...
Matt Biilman, CEO of Netlify, published an interesting piece called “Introducing AX: Why Agent Experience Matters” where he argues the coming importance of a new “X” (experience) in software: the agent experience, meaning the experience your users’ AI agents will have as aut...
Rick Rubin has an interview with Woody Harrelson on his podcast Tetragrammaton. Right at the beginning Woody talks about his experience acting and how he’s had roles that did’t turn out very well. He says sometimes he comes away from those experiences feeling dirty, like “I ...
Andy Jiang over on the Deno blog writes “If you're not using npm specifiers, you're doing it wrong”:
During the early days of Deno, we recommended importing npm packages via HTTP with transpile services such as esm.sh and unpkg.com. However, there are limitations to importi...
Let’s say you make a UI to gather some user feedback. Nothing complicated. Just a thumbs up/down widget. It starts out neutral, but when the user clicks up or down, you highlight what they clicked an de-emphasize/disable the other (so it requires an explicit toggle to change...
I’ve been working on a transition to using light-dark() function in CSS.
What this boils down to is, rather than CSS that looks like this:
:root {
color-scheme: light;
--text: #000;
}
@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) {
:root {
color-scheme: dark;
--text: #f...
So here I am playing with CSS view transitions (again).
I’ve got Dave Rupert’s post open in one tab, which serves as my recurring reference for the question, “How do you get these things to work again?”
I’ve followed Dave’s instructions for transitioning the page generally a...
I’m currently looking to add a search feature to my blog.
It’s a client-side approach, which means I was planning on using my favorite progressive-enhancement technique for client-side only search: you point a search form at Google, scope the results to your site, then use J...
Hidde de Vries gave a great talked titled “Creativity cannot be computed” (you can checkout the slides or watch the video).
In his slides he has lots of bullet points that attempt to define what art is, and then in the talk he spends time covering each one. Here’s a sampling...
Quoting myself from former days on Twitter:
Businesses have a mental model of what they do.
Businesses build software to help them do it—a concrete manifestation of their mental model.
A gap always exists between these two.
What makes a great software business is their abil...
A friend gave me a copy of the book “Perfect Wave” by Dave Hickey.
I’ve been slowly reading through each essay and highlighting parts with my red pencil.
When I got to the chapter “Cool on Cool”, this passage stood out. I want to write it down and share it:
there was this ...
Jeremy Keith, Chris Coyier, and others (see Jeremy’s post) have written about the idea of “pace layers” and now I’m going to take a stab at applying it to user interface primitives.
First, let’s start with a line of reasoning:
Common user interface controls — such as checkb...
John Gruber has a post about how Google’s search results now require JavaScript[1]. Why? Here’s Google:
the change is intended to “better protect” Google Search against malicious activity, such as bots and spam
Lol, the irony.
Let’s turn to JavaScript for protection, as if...
Let me tell you about one of the best feelings.
You have a problem.
You bang your head on it for a while.
Through the banging, you formulate a string of keywords describing the problem.
You put those words into a search engine.
You land on a forum or a blog post and read som...
This is a note to my future self, as I’ve setup HTML minification on a few different projects and each time I ask myself, “How did I do that again?” So here’s your guide, future Jim (and anyone else on the internet who finds this).
I use html-minifier to minifiy HTML files c...
A note before we start: I don’t know how much of this I believe. I’m sketching out some feelings in this post and thinking through whether it actually makes any sense. I’d be curious where other folks land on this.
I’m not sure I totally understand this impulse we have on ...
You know what’s really helpful in solving my own problems? Writing them down, sending them to someone, and not hearing back.
You ever do that? For me, it’s a bulletproof method to solving problems.
It’s akin to those moments when you go to someone with a problem, you talk i...
I took notes from Sean Voisen’s call for more hybrid tools. He speaks for a moment on generative AI and its inclusion into existing tools, but reading between the lines the insight I found was how our tools can trigger empathy for people and disciplines:
One of the greatest...
You have a dependency that provides a CLI tool, how do you use it?
Even though you did npm i from your project root, if you run <tool> <command> it won’t work because that tool is not in your global path.
You could install <tool> globally, but then if you h...
I’m playing with making cross-document view transitions work on this blog.
Nothing fancy. Mostly copying how Dave Rupert does it on his site where you get a cross-fade animation on the whole page generally, and a little position animation on the page title specifically.
...
Ever hear that idiom, “Don’t miss the forest for the trees”? The idea being, you miss the bigger picture because you’re focused on the minutia?
Feels like the tech equivalent is: Don’t miss the product for the artifacts.
Here’s Ryan Rendle in a recent piece on design artifat...
Imagine you’re on a social network and you start getting tons of followers.
You love it! Your follower count is going up!
Instead of a nobody with a couple hundred followers, you’ve bypassed the 1k+ mark and it keeps going!
You’re ecstatic! This is the “next step” you were a...
It’s a notifications’ world, we’re just living in it.
Companies can’t help but try and get your attention via email, text, or push notifications and drive you to their app.
Push notifications in particular are a powerful tool — and where there’s power, there’s abuse.
I’m sur...
I don’t think you should. I think you should use RSS.
But if you want posts delivered directly to your email, you can do that now.
However, disclaimer: I don’t know if I’ll keep this feature.
It costs me money.
And I don’t monetize my blog.
So sending you an email costs me ...
