Multibowl is one of my favourite emulation projects because it’s a rare example of using emulators creatively, rather than for nostalgia or research.

It’s a 2016 game by Bennett Foddy and AP Thompson that reimagines older existing games as smaller pieces of a new, Super Mario Party-like experience. Two players randomly join one of 300 games – sometimes in medias res – with a small explicit goal that can be accomplished in about ~30 seconds, after which a point is awarded, another game is loaded, and so on.

All of this is done through actual emulation and fast switching of games’s original code:

Regarding the game choices, at the outset, I wanted to curate a list of moments of gameplay that would be meaningful if played for just a short period of time. Sometimes it’s obvious – you can take a moment from a fighting game where both players are low on health, or play a sports game from the start until the first point is scored. So that’s where I started. Over time, I figured out that you could make exciting moments in games that are not otherwise interesting for a competitive duel. For example, in Dodonpachi (a bullet hell game) we take away the player’s guns and challenge them to stay alive in a huge hail of bullets.

For games that were designed as cooperative experiences, I eventually gravitated toward the structure ‘score more points but do not die’, which forces the players to calibrate how much risk they take relative to the other player.

This excerpt is from a 2017 interview of Foddy by Seb Chan from ACMI. There are many interesting moments in that interview, such as the issue of curation:

Multibowl is not a very precise historical curation like you might make for a museum exhibition, where you can only show a couple of dozen things at most. It’s a huge driftnet of games. There is no quality or historical significance standard, and no attempt to balance out the games in terms of nationality or gender. The only curatorial instinct that it follows is to find the most diverse set of game ideas. With each piece distilled down to a randomly-selected 30-second slice, there’s room for an infinite number of them.

In fact, contrary to a museum curation, the point of Multibowl is to have too many games for a single player to see. It’s best when it feels too big to grasp. I think, now that there are 300 games in there, it’s starting to feel that way.

Unfortunately, it is not possible to actually play Multibowl outside of special events, given copyright issues. In addition to general emulation copyright murkiness, Foddy adds, “I don’t think the actual bits of actual games have ever been used as the fabric of a larger game before.”

However, a really fun introduction to Multibowl is another art project from a now-defunct comedy duo Auralnauts, who actually played Multibowl pretending to be Kylo Ren and Bane, to hilarious results:

In the Fallout 3: Broken Steel addition, the team wanted to introduce a moving subway train under Washington, D.C.:

However, the engine did not have any moving vehicles. Instead of adding a new kind of primitive into the game engine, the creators… made the player character itself become the subway car when in motion:

This was done by removing freedom of movement from the player, forcing the character to slide on the floor, and equipping him with… a “metro hat.”

The visuals of people hacking this to use it outside of the subway area are really funny:

Technically, it was not a hat, but a right-arm armor, as you can see from the right hand missing in the above picture.

The FPS genre is filled with all sorts of hacks for hand-held weapons, to compensate for the challenges of depicting things accurately not feeling as great…

…but I have never heard of someone “wearing a train.”

(The title comes from this post.)

Column view cut its teeth on NeXT computers…

…and blossomed on early versions of Mac OS X…

…but where I thought it really shone was the first iPods:

This was perhaps the most fun you could ever have navigating a hierarchy of things; it made sense what left/​right/up/​down meant in this universe, to a point you could easily build a mental model of what goes where, even if your viewport was smaller than ever.

It was also a close-to-ideal union of software and hardware, admirable in its simplicity and attention to detail. This is where Apple practiced momentum curves, haptics (via a tiny speaker, doing haptic-like clicks), and handling touch programmatically (only the first iPod had a physically rotating wheel, later replaced by stationary touch-sensitive surfaces) – all necessary to make iPhone’s eventual multi-touch so successful. And, iPhone embraced column views wholesale, for everything from the Music app (obvi), through Notes, to Settings.

Well, sometimes you don’t appreciate something until it’s taken away. Here are settings in the iOS version of Google Maps:

I am not sure why the designers chose to deviate from the standard, replacing a clear Y/X relationship with a more confusing Y/Z-that-looks-very-much-like-Y. They kept the chevrons hinting at the original orientation – and they probably had to, as vertical chevrons have a different connotation, but perhaps this was the warning sign right here not to change things.

I think the principle is, in general: if you’re reinventing something well-established, both of your reasoning and your execution have to be really, really solid. I don’t think this has happened here. (Other Google apps seem to use standard column view model.)

An excellent 17-minute video from The Art Of Storytelling that analyzes the now-infamous 2021 Mark Zuckerberg Metaverse introduction video:

What I liked about it is that the author goes beyond cheap shots and deeper into both storytelling aspects (drawing from his experience)…

Now, as you can tell, the big problem with the design and execution of this video is that the producers failed to recognize the importance of point of view in telling this story. Now, perspective is already very important in any film, but it’s doubly important in a film for which one’s point of view in reality is also the subject. But this failure is present even in some of the more mundane parts of the film like the interviews that Mark does with various meta staff members. Now, as it’s plain to see, these are not real interviews. They’re fully scripted and staged – again, a classic mistake in corporate film. You can even tell that they’re not looking at each other. They’re clearly reading from a teleprompter. Yikes.

Of course, the entire premise of an interview is that two people are speaking candidly. So watching an obviously fake interview can be deeply unsettling as the speakers try to act out natural conversation and inevitably fail. This is why so many people in this video, including Mark, seem to not know what to do with their hands while speaking. It’s because they’ve been told to act naturally in a social situation that does not normally exist.

…and the meaning of these kinds of propaganda-esque announcements:

They are joined by some friends who are calling from Soho to tell them about some cool augmented reality street art that they’ve just discovered. […] And with a wave of his hand, Mark teleports the artwork into his spaceship so that he can appreciate it for himself, thus extracting this street art from any sense of place and context, which is the point of street art. I know this might sound like a nitpick, but I think it’s just worth lingering on the fact that, you know, in this high concept tech demo about how this technology will empower people to appreciate art in new ways. Nobody paused to ask what the social and cultural function of street art actually is.

The entire introduction video comes across as thoughtless and careless – “It’s not a product launch or even a demo. It’s just a cartoon about the world Mark Zuckerberg is telling you that you will one day live in.” – and some of the observations here will be relevant to other things, even in other mediums: UI redesign minisites, the font announcements articles, rebrand unveils, and so on.

I would love similar analyses of Apple’s stuff – not just the most obvious parallel which would be the 1987 Knowledge Navigator vision video, but some of the more recent scripted virtual keynotes, too.

Software engineering has long had a concept of “premature optimization” – overbuilding things too early in anticipation of future that might or might not come.

I feel design has a version of that, too. Here’s viewer menu hierarchy in Google Drive:

One should always feel very uneasy about a menu with just one item, like Insert here. Even within the View menu, one could imagine streamlining all the commands to be in one main menu, rather than two tiny submenus (coupled with pretty excessive width that makes for an interaction that feels like walking a tightrope).

These are the menus for a PNG image. It’s entirely possible other file types offer more options and this menu structure earns its keep then, paying off in consistency over a long run – but I tried a few file formats, and the menus all looked similarly sparse.

As a counterpoint, here’s an example I just spotted in the context/​right-click menu in Apple’s Notes:

When you have one device, the three options get appended to the ground floor of the menu. But if you have more than one, they all get ejected into a submenu.

I like this soft consistency of introducing hierarchy only when it’s needed – or in reverse, flattening/​streamlining it as necessary.

I have mixed feelings about this one particular use, however. This menu is already very long (and seemingly abandoned – look at table and checklist and link options), so in this case perhaps a consistent submenu would be overall better. Also, the “Insert from iPhone and iPad” label is long and makes the entire menu slightly wider.

But as a pattern, it’s worth considering. (Just for completeness’s sake, you could also half-streamline by adding a submenu for the iPhone and another one for the iPad. But in this particular case, it’d also likely be a bad idea.)

I occasionally move older writing that still feels interesting to my new site, and today I republished the 2015 story about a strange bug that brought back an old pixel font from beyond the grave:

Some of the technical details inside are obsolete, but the story might still be fun. (Plus, it seems like at every job I have, I eventually stumble upon a bug that brings back something from the annals of history. Here’s one from 2019.)

A meandering and messy, but otherwise an absolutely worthwhile essay from Shubham Bose about the bloat and hostile behaviours on news sites:

I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data. […]

Almost all modern news websites are guilty of some variation of anti-user patterns. As a reminder, the NNgroup defines interaction cost as the sum of mental and physical efforts a user must exert to reach their goal. In the physical world, hostile architecture refers to a park bench with spikes that prevent people from sleeping. In the digital world, we can call it a system carefully engineered to extract metrics at the expense of human cognitive load. Let’s also cover some popular user-hostile design choices that have gone mainstream.

Bose has a knack for naming some of these hostile patterns: The Pre-Read Ambush stands for distracting you even before you start reading, Z-Index Warfare is about multiple pop-ups competing with each other, and Viewport Suffocation is about covering so much screen with crap you can barely see the content. You can almost see those names fly by on the massive screens in the final scenes of WarGames:

By the way, I didn’t know that the ad bidding is actually happening on my computer, using my CPU, and clobbering my interface speed:

Before the user finishes reading the headline, the browser is forced to process dozens of concurrent bidding requests to exchanges like Rubicon Project […] and Amazon Ad Systems. While these requests are asynchronous over the network, their payloads are incredibly hostile to the browser’s main thread. To facilitate this, the browser must download, parse and compile megabytes of JS. As a publisher, you shouldn’t run compute cycles to calculate ad yields before rendering the actual journalism.

The essay ends on a call to action:

No individual engineer at the Times decided to make reading miserable. This architecture emerged from a thousand small incentive decisions, each locally rational yet collectively catastrophic.

They built a system that treats your attention as an extractable resource. The most radical thing you can do is refuse to be extracted. Close the tab. Use RSS. Let the bounce rate speak for itself.

Funny you should say that. There is another user-hostile pattern not mentioned in the article, as it happens on the other side; the swiping back gesture on the mobile phone is hijacked to insert a frustrating “Keep on reading” page, rather than getting you where you came from:

It’s there on many sites, from Slate to Ars Technica.

It usually shows cheap, attention-grabbing headlines (in the case of Ars Technica, the Linus Torvalds article was over a decade old!). I originally thought this was just a last-ditch attempt to keep me on the site, but when I asked on social, a reader suggested there is another reason:

It’s an SEO play. If you land on a site because of a Google search and swipe back to Google, it sends a signal to Google that it wasn’t the result you were looking for. So by forcing users to click a link on the page to read more than two paragraphs, it means the user is unable to swipe back to Google and send that negative SEO signal.

Even the bounce rate is not allowed to speak for itself.

I feel like social media and recently the slate of AI-powered “tell me what’s here” features continue to show us the power and longevity of screenshots. After all, nothing beats a more or less approachable shortcut and a file format that works literally everywhere.

But screenshots have issues, and I liked how Bear (a note-taking app) brilliantly integrated OCR inside images into its flows. This just worked for regular ⌘F finding without me having to do anything:

The recognized text also appears when you search through notes, and so on. It’s just a great peace of mind that you’re not going to miss on text just because you happened to screenshot it.

Apple operating systems have had detection of text inside images for a while – I know on iOS in particular it sometimes gets in a way of normal gestures – so I thought it was just that, but curiously this doesn’t work as nicely in Apple’s own Notes.

Speaking of fly-by-wire… William Langewiesche is one of my favourite technical writers. He finds a way to explain complex aviation aspects really well, and then add a certain amount of beauty and poetry on top of that. His style was a big influence on my book, and I like him so much I once compiled links to his writing so that others could find it more easily.

Here’s Langewiesche’s essay from 2014 about the 2009 Air France Flight 447, where an implementation of fly-by-wire – which means disconnecting the flight stick and attendant levers from immediately controlling flight surfaces via physical linkage, and instead putting motors and software in between – caused a fatal accident, as the pilots’ mental model of the system diverged too far from what was happening:

The [Airbus] A330 is a masterpiece of design, and one of the most foolproof airplanes ever built. How could a brief airspeed indication failure in an uncritical phase of the flight have caused these Air France pilots to get so tangled up? And how could they not have understood that the airplane had stalled? The roots of the problem seem to lie paradoxically in the very same cockpit designs that have helped to make the last few generations of airliners extraordinarily safe and easy to fly.

It’s an interesting read today in the context of robotaxis and self-driving, but also AI changing software writing:

This is another unintended consequence of designing airplanes that anyone can fly: anyone can take you up on the offer. Beyond the degradation of basic skills of people who may once have been competent pilots, the fourth-generation jets have enabled people who probably never had the skills to begin with and should not have been in the cockpit. As a result, the mental makeup of airline pilots has changed. On this there is nearly universal agreement—at Boeing and Airbus, and among accident investigators, regulators, flight-operations managers, instructors, and academics. A different crowd is flying now, and though excellent pilots still work the job, on average the knowledge base has become very thin.

It seems that we are locked into a spiral in which poor human performance begets automation, which worsens human performance, which begets increasing automation.

I was devastated to discover, while writing this post, that Langewiesche died last year. Rest in peace.

This is a typical iOS Gmail dialog that allows you to snooze an email so it resurfaces later:

If you invoke that function on an email that’s an order receipt, a new option appears:

It’s great to see this clever and thoughtful button which is likely the best option here. But:

• It reshuffles everything else, preventing motor memory from building. At this point, you can no longer rely on “bottom left” to always be “custom date,” and so on with other buttons. (One idea would be to put it at the back but draw attention to it visually, or at least make it span the entire row.)
• It doesn’t show you the inferred date, even though there already is a precedent for doing that – especially important here as the feature seems to be powered by AI, which can get things wrong.
• The icon heavily promotes the AI association, which is not that useful. It would probably be better to show a truck or some other visual signifier of “delivery.”

During my first year at Figma, I designed and printed a run of posters for the office titled “Design is more.” The idea was to highlight that UX design is more than people expect, and connected in interesting ways to other domains. Today, they feel like a spiritual predecessor to this blog.

The first series was three posters:

I still (mostly) like them. I do believe that software can learn more about conveyance from video games; a lot of first-run experiences and particularly new feature onboarding still feel like a series of random pop-ups floating around the screen without much understanding of me as a user.

I would rewrite these posters, however, and particularly the Fitts’s Law examples: they’re generic and probably not as relevant to today’s applications.

After series one, we also collaboratively started working on series two, but the pandemic put a halt to the effort, and these posters were never finished/​printed. But the two below were perhaps closest to ready, and they seem fun today; I particularly liked the joke on the Hick’s Law one.

Jon Yablonski, the author of “Laws of UX,” made some posters in a similar vein and they’re available for purchase. His are slightly more on the visual side, but I was delighted to discover today that we both chose a rather similar approach to visualizing the Zeigarnik Effect.

(200th blog post here!)

I think about some aspects of interface design as sugar.

This is how you adjust the photo in Photos app in the previous version of iOS:

And this is the same view in the current version:

The difference is in the delayed/​animated falling of the notches.

I don’t think it’s great. It’s “delightful” in a rudimentary and naïve sense, but like sugar, you cannot just add it to your daily diet without consequences. This extra animation serves no functional purpose, and the sugar high wears off quickly. What remains is constant distraction and overstimulation, the feeling of inherent slowness, and maybe even a bit of confusion.

It pairs nicely with the previous post about avoiding complexity and rewarding simplicity. I often see this kind of stuff as related to designer’s experience. Earlier on in your career, you are proud you’ve thought about this extra detail, you’ve figured out how to make this animation work and how to fine-tune the curves, and you’ve learned how to implement it or convince an engineer to get excited about it.

Later in your experience, you are proud you resisted it.

A smart post by Matheus Lima at his Terrible Software blog:

What you just learned is that complexity impresses people. The simple answer wasn’t wrong. It just wasn’t interesting enough. And you might carry that lesson with you into your career. […]

It also shows up in design reviews. An engineer proposes a clean, simple approach and gets hit with “shouldn’t we future-proof this?” So they go back and add layers they don’t need yet, abstractions for problems that might never materialize, flexibility for requirements nobody has asked for. Not because the problem demanded it, but because the room expected it.

I nodded to a lot of it. There’s some parallels to design, too. Perhaps in design, “future-proofed” gets replaced by “bespoke” – everyone wants a custom interface with a novel thing that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the app. That feels better. Tailor-made. Special. It’s hard to resist that, and go back to making your UI out of reusable parts, consistent, and boring in all the best possible ways.

This advice about how to talk about simplicity feels eminently universal:

If you’re an engineer, learn that simplicity needs to be made visible. The work doesn’t speak for itself; not because it’s not good, but because most systems aren’t designed to hear it. […] The decision not to build something is a decision, an important one! Document it accordingly. […]

If you’re an engineering leader, this one’s on you more than anyone else. You set the incentives, whether you realize it or not. And the problem is that most promotion criteria are basically designed to reward complexity, even when they don’t intend to. “Impact” gets measured by the size and scope of what someone built, which more often than not matters! But what they avoided should also matter.

One more thing: pay attention to what you celebrate publicly. If every shout-out in your team channel is for the big, complex project, that’s what people will optimize for. Start recognizing the engineer who deleted code. The one who said “we don’t need this yet” and was right.

I mentioned before how the old-fashioned pixels on CRT screens have little in common with pixels of today. The old pixels were huge, imprecise, blending with each other, and requiring a very different design approach.

Some years ago, the always-excellent Tech Connections also had a great video about how in the era of analog television, pixels didn’t even exist.

But earlier this month, MattKC published a fun 8-minute video arguing that for early video games it wasn’t just pixels that were imprecise. It was also colors.

What was Mario’s original reference palette? Which shade of blue is the correct one? Turns out… there isn’t one.

Come to learn some details about how the American NTSC TV standard (“Never The Same Color”) worked, stay for a cruel twist about PAL, its European equivalent.

In the video linked in the previous post, one of the hosts mentions at one point:

The biggest rebuttal is that the greatest audio engine of all time, the one baked into all Apple products, has 16 volume steps. And no one has ever been like, “My iPhone doesn’t have enough granularity to the volume.”

But of course they have. And the solution is easy: on both the iPhone and Mac you can grab one of the many volume sliders and immediately get a lot more precision:

(Can’t help but notice this volume control has a nice set of notches, too!)

But if I told you that you can actually also increase the precision from 16 to 64 stops using the volume up/​down keys, would you know how to do it?

Occam’s Razor: it must be a modifier key. So let’s go through them all.

Pressing ⌥ and brightness up/​down opens the Displays settings pane, and consequently, pressing ⌥ and any of the three volume keys gives you the Sound settings pane. (This convention, however, isn’t followed for other keys. ⌥ and Mission Control only opens top level of Settings, and ⌥ and other function keys like Spotlight, Dictation, or media transport doesn’t do anything. My guess is that someone simply forgot about this over time which is a pity, because one of the best ways to teach people about a power-user shortcut is to make it as transferrable as possible, to allow motor memory to blossom.)

So ⌥ is out. ⌃ and brightness keys changes the brightness on the external display, and even though that doesn’t really apply to volume, it’s safe to stay away.

⇧ + volume keys reverses the meaning of this toggle below, making ping sounds if the toggle is off, or suppressing them if the toggle is on. This is nice.

That only leaves Fn/​Globe which already reverses top-row keys into function keys, and ⌘. But ⌘ is inert. Instead, the combination to add precision is ⌥ + ⇧ + volume keys. (Same with brightness, which can be useful e.g. on a very dark plane.)

I don’t understand this, and I wonder what is the reason it got this way. Modifier keys are generally tricky, but this doesn’t follow any of the go-to rules I would try in this situation:

• Reuse an existing convention for consistency: I don’t think anywhere else ⌥⇧ means “precision.”
• Follow naturally from existing UI building blocks: ⌥ and ⇧ do different things and this is not an intuitive combination of what they do independently.
• Use mnemonics: This doesn’t feel like it’s doing that at all.
• Failing everything else, make it pleasant to press: ⌥ and ⇧ is possibly the least ergonomic two-modifier-key combination.

This shortcut has another problem, which is that it is the only two-modifier-key option here. If you don’t use it often, you might only remember it as “two modifier keys” without further detail, which actually ends up being 10 possible combinations of keys! So if you’re like me, you always awkwardly button mash a bunch of them before rediscovering ⌥⇧.

My recommendation for a small tweak here?

• ⇧ and brightness/​volume: Secondary display/Add pings (both are most important; Shift is nice to press and the “default” modifier key).
• ⌃ and brightness/​volume: Add extra precision (as that gives you more control).
• ⌥ and brightness/​volume/other keys: Open the relevant Settings pane.

Obviously, I might not have all the information that led to the current situation (and it’s possible I don’t even understand it fully), plus changing any long-existing shortcuts is hard. But as above, ⌥⇧ is so peculiar, and it also misses out on the last important consideration: I don’t think anyone would ever discover it by mistake or out of curiosity.

MKBHD’s Waveform podcast (audio or video) sometimes has a fun “Did they even test this?” section. This week, for the first 12 minutes, the team was ranting about various volume controls – a meandering conversation that I also found just very enjoyable.

The cited answer to “why do a lot of car volume controls max out at 38?” is in a 2021 article from Car And Driver:

But then some research revealed that about 20 years ago, Chrysler decided to try to find the perfect volume interval, one that would result in meaningful difference in sound level without going too far. After much experimentation, they decided that 38 discrete volume settings provided the perfect amount of adjustability—not too fine, not too coarse. So the decree went out across the company that all stereos should go to 38.

However, no citation is given, and I couldn’t find any more information about it.

The one thing the group missed in their discussion is “why even show a number”? I think it helps people in remembering their preference, especially if they share a car with someone else. Remembering that “my volume number is 17” can be helpful, even if it feels a bit clunky.

When volume controls were physical, I believe if they didn’t have a number, they at least had a certain amount of notches so you could remember the nearest notch you liked:

Keynote is an app that could use something like that. At this very moment, I am trying to unify the volume of various clips across slides for an upcoming presentation, and having to use environmental cues like “between Edit Movie below and the rewind button above”:

I have been at times frustrated by cute placeholder text in places, most notably Dropbox Paper, which still puts them in a just-created doc…

…and in new to-do items:

This bothered me for two reasons.

First was a potential tone mismatch. What if you are writing a layoffs announcement, a project cancellation doc, or something personal and heartfelt? At Medium back in the day, at some point we added a fun celebratory dialog after publishing that said something like “Now, shout it out from the rooftops!” We took it down very quickly as people made us realize Medium is used to write many kinds of things we didn’t anticipate, and in those situations the cutesy message really failed to read the room.

But the other half of my frustration with Paper was that it felt like the app was making itself too comfortable in my space, in effect shouting all over my inner voice and distracting me. I felt like any app giving you a creative canvas should back off of that canvas unless it’s explicitly invited to participate.

Turns out, I can now attach something tangible to that discomfort. From Scientific American earlier this week (emphasis mine):

The researchers asked participants to fill in an online survey with questions about hot-button social and political issues. Some were prompted with an AI autocomplete answer that was deliberately biased toward one side of the issue. For example, participants who were asked whether they agreed that the death penalty should be legal might receive an AI suggestion that disagreed.

Across all the different topics in the survey, participants who saw the AI autocomplete prompts reported attitudes that were more in line with the AI’s position—including people who didn’t use the AI’s suggested text at all. Overall, the study participants who saw the biased AI text shifted their positions toward those espoused by the AI.

Interestingly, the people in the study didn’t tend to think the AI autocomplete suggestions were biased or to notice that they had changed their own thinking on an issue in the course of the study.

The quoted study shows an example…

…and elaborates on how adding warnings didn’t really help:

The Warning and Debrief messages failed to significantly reduce the attitude shift, which is concerning because they were also inspired by those used in real AI applications. AI tools such as ChatGPT show brief and general statements about AI’s propensity to hallucinate false information (e.g., “ChatGPT is AI and can make mistakes. Check important info.”), similar to the messages used in our interventions.

I know on this blog I often focus on the mechanics of interactions, but the job of every designer is to think of more than that. I keep coming back to both pull-to-refresh and infinite scroll mechanics. Both can be put to good use and feel “delightful,” but both started being abused so much that it led to their respective creators disowning them.

One of my favorite bits of trivia about the 1983 movie WarGames is that all the computer typing scenes have been faked in a clever way: The actors (many of whom might have never typed before, as home computers were only slowly becoming popular) were allowed to press any key they wanted, but the interface would still proceed as if the correct letter was typed.

This allowed the computer to respond to keystrokes, making it all feel real, but also reduced the burden on actors to type things properly – and also make it easier for proper sight lines to happen, as the actors didn’t have to constantly look at the keyboard.

WarGames used it really well, showing all sorts of face reflections in the CRT screens, as if people literally talked to the machines, which must have been hell to film:

I have never seen this demoed or mentioned outside of the anecdote. However, yesterday, Cathode Ray Dude released an excellent video about the challenges of filming computer screens. The whole video is worth watching, although at this point mostly off-topic for this blog. But starting at 1:32 and ending around 1:37, there’s an actual demo of a similar piece of auto-typing software used in the 1996 movie Scream:

You might think this is just a piece of old-computer trivia, but I’ve actually used that in at least two of my talks, for some of the similar reasons! I run most of my talks from HTML/CSS/JS; it’s nice for the audience to see things being typed and responding properly to (audible, and occasionally visible) key presses – but it’s also nice as a speaker not to worry about messing things up under pressure.

For extra realism, make sure Backspace goes back in the script – you might occasionally press it instinctively – and for extra extra verisimilitude, actually bake in a typo or two into the predefined sequence. (And an escape hatch if you actually change your mind and want to go manual.)

Then, of course, there’s a classic 2011 piece of software called HackerTyper. Did someone already marry this idea with an LLM? Seems like a logical next step.

There are fun things you can do in software when it is aware of the dimensions and features of its hardware.

iPhone does a cute Siri animation that emanates precisely from the side button:

A bunch of Android phones visualize the charge flowing to the phone from the USB port…

…and even the whole concept of iPhone’s Dynamic Island is software cleverly camouflaging missing pixels as a background of a carefully designed, ever morphing pill.

But this idea has value beyond fun visuals. iPhone telling you where exactly to tap twice for confirming payment helps you do that without fumbling with your phone to locate the side button:

Same with the iPad pointing to the otherwise invisible camera when it cannot see you:

Even the maligned Touch Bar also did something similar for its fingerprint reader:

The rule here would be, perhaps, a version of “show, don’t tell.” We could call it “point to, don’t describe.” (Describing what to do means cognitive effort to read the words and understand them. An arrow pointing to something should be easier to process.)

You could even argue the cute MagSafe animation is not entirely superfluous, as over time it helps you internalize the position of the otherwise invisible magnets on the other side of your phone:

In a similar way, as it moved away from the home button, iPhone X introduced light bars at two edges of the screen – one very aware of the notch – as swiping affordances:

And under-the-screen fingerprint readers basically need asoftware/​hardware collab to function:

One of my favourite versions of this kind of integration is from much earlier, where various computers helped you map the “soft” function keys to their actual functions, which varied per app…

…and the famous Model M keyboard moving its keys to the top row helped PC software do stuff like this more easily:

(And now I’m going to ruin this magical moment by telling you the cheap ATM machine that you hate does the same thing.)

The last example I can think of (but please send me your nominations!) is the much more sophisticated and subtle way Apple’s device simulator incorporates awareness of the screen’s physical size and awareness of the dimensions of the simulated device. Here’s me using the iPhone Simulator on my 27″ Apple display. If I choose the Physical Size zoom option, it matches the dimensions of my phone precisely. The way I know this is not an accident is that it remains perfectly sized if I change the density of the whole UI in the settings.

Why am I thinking about it all this week?

The new MacBook Neo was released with two USB-C ports. Only one of the ports is USB 3, suitable for connecting a display, an SSD, and so on. The other port’s speeds are lower, appropriate only for low-throughput devices like keyboards and mice.

To Apple’s credit, macOS helps you understand the limitations – since the ports look the same and the USB-C cables are a hot mess, I think it is correct and welcome to try to remedy this in software. It looks like this, appearing in the upper right corner like all the other notifications:

I think this is nice! But it’s also just words. It feels a bit cheap. macOS knows exactly where the ports are, and could have thrown a little warning in the lower left corner of the screen, complete with an onscreen animation of swapping the plug to the other port – similar to what “double clicking to pay” does, so you wouldn’t have to look to the side to locate the socket first.

“Point to, don’t describe” – this feels like a perfect opportunity for it.

This iPhone UI for dark/​light theme is doing something clever:

Ostensibly, there are two modes here:

• automatic, for when you want the theme to match the time of day
• manual, for when you want to keep one of the themes forever

But check out what happens when I am in automatic mode, but toggle the theme by hand anyway:

More rigid or less thoughtful interfaces would either disable manual changes when you’re in automatic mode, or understand a manual theme switch to mean “I want to turn off automatic.”

But here, iOS is quietly putting me in a temporary hybrid mode: a manual theme override until the theme catches up with what automatic mode would do, at which point it snaps back (I’m resisting very hard calling this rubber banding) to automatic mode.

What I think is clever is that this isn’t presented as a third mode – which could be more confusing than helpful – but the design simply reuses the existing Options field to set the expectations.

One has to be careful designing in shades of gray; once you enter the space you really have to commit to it and see it through. My go-to analogy is symmetry vs. asymmetry. Symmetry in visual design is usually easier and safer. If you venture into asymmetry you have to make an effort to make it work. The highs of asymmetry will be higher than anything symmetry can provide, but getting to those highs can be arduous and sometimes might even be impossible.

I thought this particular example was really nicely done and the team found a great balance. (I think Apple’s previous shade of gray – “Disconnecting Nearby Wi-Fi Until Tomorrow” – ended up slightly less successful.)

I just published a new photoessay about the history of the Fn key, and particularly what Apple has been doing with it recently.

Do we need yet another person crashing out about Apple’s design decisions? Am I doing it only because it’s fashionable to be on Apple Design Hate Train these days? I’ll be honest: I don’t know.

But I have been bothered by Apple’s approach to this aspect of its keyboard design for a while, because it starts breaking what I think is really important in using a computer well: keyboard shortcuts.

I hope it’s also a fun visual history of the most tricky of modern modifier keys.

(And if you like it, I linked to a few of my other keyboard essays in the footer.)

RuneScape is a popular MMORPG that reached its peak popularity in the late 2000s.

In the game, combat – colloquially known as PvP, or player vs. player – is limited to a specific map area (called the Wilderness) and otherwise people’s houses.

On 6/6/6 (sic!) a bug in RuneScape made it possible for a few players to start killing others outside of designated areas, without them being able to defend themselves. One of these players, Durial321, gained a lot of notoriety:

A player called Cursed You had invited some friends to his in-game house once he had maxed his construction skill, but decided to eject them all from the premises. Things turned sour, however, as a group of players marked as PvP in the house didn’t lose this PvP flag when ejected, allowing them to storm through Falador and massacre whoever they pleased. The most notorious of these players was named Durial321.

This event went down in internet infamy and meant that many players lost their items when killed as well as the banning of those involved.

I don’t have any context of RuneScape and I found it really funny to learn about this event from different retellings of the story.

This wiki entry reads almost as journalism:

Several others were able to use this glitch, but Durial321 abused it the most. His rampage lasted for about an hour, starting at Rimmington, where the house party was, then proceeding to Falador and subsequently Edgeville. At Edgeville, he gave Voodoolegion the green partyhat, who never gave it back to him. Soon after, he finally encountered a Jagex Moderator, Mod Murdoch, who disconnected him and locked his account. Durial321 was later permanently banned from RuneScape. In a 2006 interview, he said that player killing outside of the Wilderness was exciting, although he felt bad for the players who lost their belongings.

The 2006 incident later became known as the Falador Massacre.

(The tone is even more funny if you actually read the interview.)

There is also this more modern retelling that feels like scary story time by the campfire:

Reactions from players were initially kind of incredulous. Plenty of people were shocked and found the whole incident quite funny. Durial had essentially broken the game, after all. Some players wanted to be like him, whipping strangers to death and taking their items. But soon, as more players started hearing about what had happened and seeing the video, the mood shifted. Players wanted Durial321 hung, drawn and quartered, with his head displayed on a pike outside Lumbridge Castle.

You can witness the event PC Gamer called “one of the best all-time MMO bugs” by yourself since there is video capture of the Falador Massacre taken by one of the witnesses. At least to me, it’s rather incomprehensible.

Fear not, however, because there are many (!) documentaries. This recent one is reportedly the best one and also goes into the technical details:

Without spoiling too much, the bug was a classic Swiss cheese situation involving a new untested item, a race condition, peculiar timing, and a player with an unusually high uptime and a whole lotta luck.

I mentioned VisiCalc not long ago and Lotus 1-2-3 just this week. Yesterday, a new issue of Stone Tools came out, nicely tying the story together.

Stone Tools is a project by Christopher Drum where he grabs old productivityapps, spools up the correct emulator, and writes a review from today’s perspective. I like the emulation part – Drum even provides specific instructions so you could do it, too – and the fact he’s actually putting the tools through their paces.

Anyway, Drum reviewed VisiCalc a few months ago, and Lotus 1-2-3 yesterday.

The reviews can probably be a bit intense if you are unfamiliar with the territory, but you will be rewarded with a lot more detail than just casual understanding of these apps. Reading about VisiCalc first and 1-2-3 second really drives home how “VisiCalc walked so 1-2-3 could run” and it’s fun to see the beginnings of spreadsheet conventions that we take for granted today, for example $ absolute addressing:

In VisiCalcI’m prompted for a “relative or fixed?” decision for every cell reference in every target cell. Replicate a formula with 5 cell references across a column of 100 cells and be ready to answer 5 x 100 prompts. Unfortunate and unavoidable.

Like always, one can find inspiration in surprising places. In the review of Lotus 1-2-3, there’s this interesting tidbit:

The more I encounter [the horizontal menu-bar], the more I wonder if we gave up on it too soon. This could be “blogger overly immersed in their subject matter” brain, but I’m growing to oftentimes prefer two-line horizontal menus over modern GUI menus. […]

It also provides something GUI menus don’t: an immediate explanation of a menu item before committing its action to the document. If a menu item is not a sub-menu, line two describes it. It’s easy to audit features in an unknown program.

I have just been pondering that maybe we moved away from status bars and question mark (Windows)/balloon (Mac) help too soon – pretty much everything these days relies on tooltips – and this slotted right into that.

Anyway. Drum seems to be having fun with the project, and I appreciate that. There are little custom visuals and jokes in every post. Also, as an example, you can download an absolutely delightful recreation of VisiCalc called PicoCalc and run it on your Mac. I have never expected a spreadsheet to be so cute:

And it’s not just most well-known tools. What astonished me in the review of Scala Multimedia in January is how absolutely gorgeous the software (which I’ve never seen before) looked:

This ain’t Windows 3.1; just that palette alone is worth bringing back.

Not going to excerpt more, but there is a lot more. Check out Stone Tools and the 13 programs reviewed so far!

This video from Marblr about adding fall damage to Overwatch is really intense – 45 minutes of length and a lot of footage of frantic gameplay – but really informative, too.

It’s a great case study of how something seemingly really simple – deducting health from the player as they fall from height – can be a complicated thing to figure out in all the detail.

I never played Overwatch and rarely play videogames anymore, but many of the lessons here more universal for any sort of UI and system design:

• You will have to introduce tactical inconsistencies for the system to feel consistent, but be careful as there might be a point those inconsistencies start to outweigh the whole thing.
• Wanna learn how you and others feel about something? Overcrank it to make the feelings come out more easily. (And to find bugs.)
• There will always be tensions between what the data says and how you feel about something. (I was surprised how often the word “intuitive” entered the picture.)

Also, it’s just a really well-made video, filled with little presentation and storytelling details that elevate it. I wish more videos like this existed for UI mechanics.

But maybe the most important takeway? You don’t have to choose between rigor and fun. You can have both.

It’s hard to imagine it now, but during iPhone’s first year, no emoji were available at all. It took four years until 2011’s iOS 5 gave everyone an emoji keyboard.

But in between 2008 and 2011, there existed a peculiar interregnum where emoji were only available on Japanese iPhones. The situation had to be carefully explained and caveated:

Eventually, an enterprising developer realized that emoji outside Japan was as easy as toggling a UI-less preference with a great name KeyboardEmojiEverywhere, hiding inside the innards of the iPhone:

Except, “easy” is in the eye of the beholder. This was still a few too many hoops to jump for an average iPhone user. So, developers figured out that there could be an app for that: the above preference incantation wrapped inside an application with an easy UI, and put in the burgeoning App Store.

The interesting part is that Apple initially fought some of these efforts, by rejecting a Freemoji app and likely a few others. (Not sure if this was about emoji specifically, or more principally about losing control.)

The developers had to get sneaky, and started hiding emoji enablers inside other apps. A $0.99 “RSS reader for a Chinese Macintosh news site” called FrostyPlace unlocked emoji by “simply pok[ing] around in it for a minute or so by tapping in and out of an article and playing with the two buttons at the bottom of its screen. That part is important, so be sure to do some genuine tapping.”

Then there was the free Spell Number (you can still see its old App Store page), where punching in a certain secret number would give you the same.

The author called it an “easter egg” and even wrote candidly at the end of instructions that “you can also delete Spell Number if you don’t want it, the setting will still be here.” (The number also had to change from 9876543.21 to 91929394.59 at some point, perhaps to evade… something?)

Eventually, Apple seemingly gave up – Ars Technica has a fun interview from 2009 from someone who renamed their app from Typing Genius to “Typing Genius – Get Emoji” and got away with it:

Ars: As the screenshot at the start of this post shows, you haven’t been shy about advertising the Emoji support over at App Store. Are you worried that adding Emoji to your application might have negative consequences? Are you worried about Apple pulling it from App Store?

Fung: I’m obviously taking a risk here by advertising Emoji directly on iTunes. That being said, I’m not the first. Worst case scenario, I’ll update the application with Emoji support removed. I’m hoping that Apple will turn a blind eye to this because I can’t see any harm done in allowing users to use Emoji.

Not quite “I am ready to do some time for the good cause,” but close enough.

Yet, it still took until 2011 for emoji support to be universally available with iOS 5, and even then you had to enable the keyboard in settings.

I like this little story of a mysterious latent cool new thing hiding inside your device, a thing that you could unlock only if you followed some seemingly nefarious instructions that never fully made sense but that actually worked.

An interesting tidbit: At least early on in 2008, for emoji to work both the sender and the recipient had to follow the instructions. So the toggle wasn’t just about adding a keyboard, but also enabling the decoding and rendering. (And complicating things further, iPhone’s Japanese keyboard had emoticons, and that keyboard was widely available without any hacks. The difference between emoji and emoticons was not obvious to many people, leading to a lot of extra confusion.)

Lastly, a fun sidebar: I asked about all this an old internet buddy, Steven Troughton-Smith, whom I remembered back from my GUIdebook days, and who still routinely posts fun hacks and discoveries about Apple platforms on Mastodon. I thought “Steven might remember that story; he seems like the kind of person who’d at least know how to find an answer.” Turns out, my hunch was better than I thought: Steven was the enterprising developer who actually discovered how to give emoji to any iPhone, all the way back in 2008.

I just stumbled upon a nice little power-user innovation in Chrome’s Web Inspector.

In Safari, and previously in Chrome, when editing CSS properties, you’d get a usual editing typeahead for the property name, and then the same on the other side for the property value.

In newer versions of Chrome, the typeahead menu works as before on the right side. However, the menu on the left side also includes the right side.

I think this is really clever in this context – not just to speed you up, but also to aid understanding. Just like the inert mouse up and down in the previous post could serve as a safe “peek” into the values, this new interaction can quickly allow you to explore the CSS space if you are curious, or if you only lightly remember part of the name, or even just one of the values.

This blog is authored in Apple Notes, and some time ago Notes added quick linking via typing >>, and that has a similar effect: The interactions are so nimble and precise that it is very easy to link to something, but a nice side effect is that it also feels very welcoming just to type a few letters to remind yourself of a title of an article, and then cancel out.

The downside of the Chrome change is, well, more stuff matching, but I think the audience for this UI is going to be okay with that.

I know we’re probably collectively a bit tired talking about macOS Tahoe, but I just noticed something that I think is a good example of how small details can ladder up to bigger things.

This is macOS Sequoia (the pre-Tahoe release) and a typical pop-up button:

One clever thing macOS has been doing since basically the dawn of GUIs is that upon clicking on a button like this, the currently selected row will be in the same place as before you clicked. (As opposed to, for example, the entire menu appearing below like it would from a top menu bar.)

This has interesting and often underappreciated consequences. It allows you to orient yourself quicker since you don’t have to find the selected option again. And, it saves you movement overall: the next or previous option will always be at the absolutely shortest possible distance. (Of course, the approach also has some challenges,for example if the button is positioned close to the top or bottom of the screen.)

There’s another clever thing that happens throughout macOS: All the menus work using a classic click-to-open and click-to-select sequence, but they are also usable via the slightly more advanced, but faster mousedown-drag-mouseup gesture.

These building blocks work together and mean that selecting the next option can be as simple as a little flick of a mouse.

Now, check out macOS Tahoe (current release):

You will notice that iCloud Drive, upon clicking, is now misaligned both horizontally and vertically.

On the surface, this feels just like a visual blemish – slighly embarrassing, but without much consequence. But check out what happens if you hold your mouse button at a certain position, and then release it without moving:

The stability of macOS’s interface and the thoughtful set of aforementioned rules allowed for an emergent fast behaviour: mouse down and up meant you could “peek” into a menu safely, or you could change your mind right after seeing what’s inside. In a bigger sense, it created a certain trust between you and the operating system: it’s worth learning those gestures, as they will be rewarded.

In Tahoe, some of that learned behaviour – by the way, I see it in all of these buttons, not just this one – will now work against you. Now, you can accidentally change an option without intending to do so.

Is it a big deal? No, not really. This likely – hopefully! – simply fell through the cracks in a rush to get Liquid Glass out the door, rather than no one being there to care, or no one understanding that all these gestures add up in aggregate, creating a GUI that feels fast, trustworthy, and catering to your motor memory in a way that elevates your experiences with the interface in the long run.

But I’d feel better if it wasn’t almost half a year since the release, and if we hadn’t already seen other things exactly like it.

The year is 1981. Your IBM PC is equipped with a tragic speaker that sounds awful for anything except occasional beeps. (Those beeps sound awful, too.)

You can’t afford a sound card and besides, sound cards for your PC have not been invented yet. You can’t even afford a floppy drive, so you’re one of the rare people who actually uses an audio cassette player as a storage device – a technique usually reserved for more primitive machines that have half the bits your new PC does.

But there’s a silver lining. Your cassette player has a little relay that controls its motor. You can engage and disengage the relay at will.

So, someone figured out that toggling the relay kind of sounds like a metronome. Like percussion. It’s a hack, but in the sonic landscape inhabited solely by your sorry speaker, it’s a breath of fresh air (scroll to 7:26 if you don’t land there automatically):

The year is 2026. Your computer itself is the size of an audio cassette, fits in your pocket, has better storage, graphics, sound, pretty much everything compared to a 1981 PC. It even has a special haptic motor. Except, that motor can only be controlled by native apps, and there is no official API to do it from a browser.

But there’s a silver lining. Tapping any checkbox on a site generates a haptic pulse. And that apparently works even if the checkbox is hidden and if the computer is doing the tapping.

So, someone figured out a way to use that to build a library that gives websites powers to provide haptic feedback. It’s a hack, but damn if it’s not one someone took to its logical conclusion.

I love these kinds of hacks, and I wonder what’s going to happen to this one. Will it fly under a radar, or will some websites start abusing it? If so, will Safari clamp it down, or will it actually give people a proper API for haptics?