Just kidding. But it’s a happy 20th annivesary to the little interactive explainer I made of Fitts’ Law back in 2005!
It’s charming in a sort of early-web kinda way, but still holds up – at least on bigger screens. I even ran it on my iPad and it worked.
Every so often, a wonderful thing happens: someone young enough to have missed out on using computers in the early 1990s is introduced to the Windows 3.1 “Hot Dog Stand” color scheme.
I can’t figure out whether Gruber’s take (“That’s Microsoft.”) is also a subtle jab at Apple in the year of Liquid Glass.
Also, great first comment under the original post:
I assume “Plasma Power Saver” served an actual purpose - it was intended for users of “portable” machines having a gas plasma display. Early ones were monochrome (orange) and I guess the actual color hue didn’t matter so much as the intensity.
Early plasma displays were genuinely fascinating.
Forgot about this cute little story:
It used to be that when you dragged an item off the Dock and dropped it, the icon would disappear in a puff of smoke and make a satisfying noise. The animation was strangely primitive against the backdrop of the slick user interface of what used to called Mac OS X.
I too wondered why that animation was weirdly amateurish, almost like a placeholder. Well,
One of the most talented engineers on the team took out a piece of paper. I wish I could say it was a napkin to make the story better. ¶ On the piece of paper, he drew a series of five frames. The intention of the designer was that these drawings would stoke further discussion. That it would get cleaned up and refined later. ¶ But that never happened. It shipped as is. And the rest is history.
Also when looking it up, I found a mention of a fascinating bug that exposed the origin of the animation as a sprite.
This is inside my Sony Alpha camera: a teensy too technical, or maybe slightly-lost-in-translation-from-Japanese message. I love it. It has personality without trying to be cute.
I just got my first Windows laptop in ages, and a little nervous to dig in, given the burgeoning reputation.
(My secret: I used to admire Windows in the 3.x and 9x and 2000 era because I always thought its keyboard operation was a lot better than Mac OS’s.)
I spend a lot of time at work thinking and designing (and avoiding) loading states, and someone just reminded me of a piece I wrote ten years ago, so I just moved it from Medium to my new website, and updated with new things I learned.
It’s about TV clock idents and what they meant to me growing up – possibly the original “loading state” in my life.
Of course, really, nothing compares to the absolutely banging BBC News “loading state”, which is fantastic, infinitely memeable, and brilliant even before you realize it cleverly incorporates the historical Greenwich Time Signal in it in a way that absolutely gives me chills.
Best comment under that BBC News theme: “As a swiss, this makes me proud to be british.”
What is it about Brits and extraordinarily perfectly timed music? Here’s Pet Shop Boys and Casting a shadow, made especially for and matching the total solar eclipse in 2000 to within half a second.
An extremely thoughtful moment in DaVinci Resolve. When you drop the first video clip into a new project, it suggests to update the settings of the entire project, on the correct assumption that the first media might set the tone of the whole thing.
“You can’t undo this action” is scary and kind of… untrue? But I’ve stopped reading by then. I press Enter and it saves me a trip to a complex project settings dialog box I always forget the location of.
Made me laugh. lanyardigan on Bluesky:
From the vantage point of 2025, optimization is clearly no longer a priority for the tech platforms. Google’s search results have gotten worse. Google doesn’t care. Facebook is awash in AI slop. It welcomes the slop. Amazon is filled with fake products and fake reviews. All of these companies still dominate their categories. Degrading the user experience isn’t costing them. The motivating belief that these companies had to optimize, or else they would be out-competed, no longer drives Silicon Valley behavior. Optimization was an era. That era has ended.
Hidden inside that essay is also a link to The Resonant Computing Manifesto, with this good paragraph:
Most of us got into tech with an earnest desire to leave the world better than we found it. But the incentives and cultural norms of the tech industry have coalesced around the logic of hyper-scale. It’s become monolithic, magnetic, all-encompassing—an environment that shapes all who step foot there. While the business results are undeniable, so too are the downstream effects on humanity.
I’ve always been curious whether those “dyslexic-friendly” fonts amount to anything, and this 2022 post I haven’t seen before puts this idea to rest:
But the new fonts—and the odd assortment of paraphernalia that came before them—assume that dyslexia is a visual problem rooted in imprecise letter recognition. That’s a myth, explains Joanne Pierson, a speech-language pathologist at the University of Michigan. “Contrary to popular belief, the core problem in dyslexia is not reversing letters (although it can be an indicator),” she writes. The difficulty lies in identifying the discrete units of sound that make up words and “matching those individual sounds to the letters and combinations of letters in order to read and spell.”
(via Daring Fireball, whom I quoted for the title, via Jens Kutílek, whose fonts I use)
