Jason Grigsby has a great article where he surfaces an opinion from the Safari team about how AI agents shouldn’t get special treatment:
An agent acting on a user’s behalf is, in effect, assistive technology: it should operate a site as the user would, and the site should n...
Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar and former president of Disney Animation, was on the David Senra podcast and I quite enjoyed the interview.
(If you like the interview, you should read his book.)
Ed talks about what he considered his job to be: get the dynamics right for gro...
There are two wolves inside of me, lol.
Some days I want to be a “designer”. Other days I want to be a “developer”.
On the days I find myself wanting to feed the developer, it’s often because making something “work” seems easier (and more impressive) than making something “g...
I wish I could remember how this podcast came across my radar so I could give credit where it’s due. But alas, I cannot.
It’s episode 217 with Dr. Iain McGilchrist.
At one point, he shares his perspective about how science and reason can only take you so far:
[science and r...
As icons continue to change across Apple’s platforms, I have thoughts. They mainly revolve around two perspectives:
What I think of icons as a long-time user of Apple’s platforms.
What I think of icons as a digital collector and physical archivist of icons.
Let’s see if I ...
“We asked 100 people: What are the top three companies on earth best positioned to make a world-class Mac-assed Mac app?”
Buzz!
“Apple!”
Survey says:
Yes! Apple at the number one spot.
Makes sense. Who better to make the very definition of a great Mac app than the people ...
I made some updates to my notes blog, including a change to how my “Shuffle” feature worked.
Figured I’d blog about it.
Shuffle? On a Blog?
At the time of this writing, I have 974 “notes” that I’ve published.
For fun, I have a “shuffle” button that digs up a random note fro...
I was popping off about negation being an act of creativity, when Blake Watson introduce me to the idea of the “This Page Intentionally Left Blank”-Project (Internet Archive):
In former times printed manuals had some blank pages, usually with the remark “this page intentio...
I quite enjoyed this talk from Bryan Cantrill where he discusses the difficult engineering problems they overcame while working on their company Oxide.
Some of the problems they ran into were bugs. But these weren’t any ordinary bugs, they were company-destroying bugs: bugs ...
If you have’t heard, Om Malik passed away.
People are sharing stories of their graceful encounters with him.
This one is mine.
Back at the beginning of 2021, I set a goal to write 72 blog posts.
I was puttering along, publishing whatever came to mind, mostly figuring that n...
John Gruber writes about those annoying popups every website seems to have now and while he does a great job tearing into these ubiquitous, user-hostile patterns, one of the things that stood out to me about his piece was this meta commentary on blogging. Here’s John:
If yo...
Consistency serves a purpose in visual design, but it seems to have become the purpose of a lot of visual design.
Look no further than these evolutions of macOS icons (image courtesy of BasicAppleGuy):
The Creator Studio icons are undeniably consistent visually: rounded r...
You’ve probably heard the term.
It’s meant to convey how difficult it can be to start something.
“Blank page paralysis”.
But for my money, beginning is easy. Finishing is the hard part.
In software, they call it “the last 90%”.
In logistics, they call it “the last mile”.
It’s that final stretch that’s disproportionately hard.
Finishing makes something real and finite, subject to judgment.
As I near completion, there’s a little voice in my head that says, “As long as it’s unfinished, there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s still potentially perfect!”
I don’t struggle with blank page paralysis.
But I am paralyzed in the face of a full page ready for publishing.
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Bluesky
Golf content on social media is my online junk food and the other day I came across a video interviewing professional golfers that asks: “What does an amateur golfer have to shoot to be considered good?”
It’s a leading question because the phrasing implicitly frames a number...
Code isn’t just a way to implement a design, it’s a way to find one.
With an interface, you have to use it, feel it, interact with it, and poke at it to see the relationships between things.
Change X, see Y react.
If it doesn’t feel right, tweak it.
Change X again, now Y reacts differently.
Better.
Keep tweaking — this here, that there, until the relationships of all the disparate elements fall into place as a single whole.
Balanced.
Design is “how it works” and code is the tool to specify how it works.
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Bluesky
The very first computer programming class I ever took introduced me to the idea of there being different kinds of numbers, like integers, floats, and doubles (it was a C++ course).
“You mean, when I assign a variable, I have to say up front what kind of number this is?”
It w...
I’ve been slowly listening to Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Essential Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger.
I like his practicality. He’s never trying to be overly academic, as if he needs to prove how smart he is.
He says Berkshire’s success doesn’t come from them solving har...
This is an iconic observation:
If you put the Apple icons in reverse it looks like the portfolio of someone getting really really good at icon design
This isn’t, however, just the story of Apple’s Creator Studio icons. It’s the unfolding story of icon design across the e...
Here’s Scott Jenson in his insightful piece “The Ma of a New Machine”:
the chatbot interface [makes us] feel like deep cognitive work is happening. But the interface is fundamentally reactive. It spits complex text at you, you skim it quickly, and you immediately type a rea...
I’ve been posting about how you can make lots of HTML pages and leverage navigations over in-page, JS-dependent interactions.
Now I’m gonna post another example.
On my icon sites, I have a little widget that allows you to resize the icons you’re looking at.
Previously, I ...
I wrote about building websites with LLMs — (L)ots of (L)ittle ht(M)l page(s) — and I think it’s time for a post-mortem on that approach:
I like it.
I’ve tweaked a few things from that original post but the underlying idea is still the same, which I would describe as:
Avoid ...
I’ve been thinking about speed which is why Chris Coyier caught my attention in his latest piece discussing how AI might be 10✕ing the speed with which we code, but it’s not making our software 10✕ better:
Faster individuals don’t make a fast company
My mind immediately we...
I’ve been thinking about speed which is why Chris Coyier caught my attention in his latest piece discussing how AI might be 10✕ing the speed with which we code, but it’s not making our software 10✕ better:
Faster individuals don’t make a fast company
My mind immediately we...
In the early 2000’s, my parents took us on a road trip to Glacier National Park in Montana.
We made the journey in our new (used) family van: a green Dodge Caravan whose reputation was soon to become “a lemon”.
I was a teenager and didn’t pay a lot of attention to the detail...
Speed has become the primary virtue of the modern world. Everything is sacrificed to it.
Move fast (and break things, not as a goal but as a consequence).
Wisdom requires allowing yourself to be undone by experience:
An opinion dismantled by reality.
An artifact torn apart ...
I quipped on BlueSky:
It’s interesting how AI proponents are often like "skill issue" when the LLM doesn't work like someone expects.
Whereas when human-centered UX people see someone using it wrong, they're like "skill issue on us, the people who made this"
This is top of...
Me, in 2025, on Mastodon:
I love tools like Netlify and deploying my small personal sites with git push
But i'm not gonna lie, 2025 might be the year I go back to just doing builds locally and pushing the deploys from my computer.
I'm sick of devops'ing stupid stuff because...
Did you know that Jesus gave advice about prototyping with an LLM? Here’s Luke 14:28-30:
Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Won’t you first sit down and estimate the cost to see if you have enough money to complete it? For if you lay the foundation and are not able ...
Simon Willison wrote about how he vibe coded his dream presentation app for macOS.
I also took a stab at vibe coding my dream app: an RSS reader.
To clarify: Reeder is my dream RSS app and it already exists, so I guess you could say my dreams have already come true?
But I’ve...
Marcin Wichary brings attention to this lovely dialog in ClarisWorks from 1997:
He quips:
this breaks the rule of button copy being fully comprehensible without having to read the surrounding strings first, perhaps most well-known as the “avoid «click here»” rule. Never ...
