I know software updates can be exhausting these days; on top of regular weariness of things changing, there’s contentious stuff like Liquid Glass, or thoughtless AI integrations.

So, I’m curious: What is a recent software update, anywhere, that made you happy? Something that made an app genuinely better for you, or showed a developer listening to users, or was just plain old delightful?

I’d love to learn, and I will summarize the responses next week.

If you want to, you can respond on Mastodon and Bluesky – and see other a few people’s nominations as inspiration – or send me an email. Thank you in advance!

John Gruber at Daring Fireball penned a short eulogy for Maestral:

As of today Maestral continues to work just fine. I don’t know when these certificates are expiring. And I don’t know what I’m going to do when they do.

Dropbox enshittified its app – my friend joked once that Dropbox is a rare example of a company that pivoted away from a product-market fit – and it seems Apple’s API changes didn’t really help, either.

Maestral stepped in to help restore the minimalistic, functional core of Dropbox – I believe Doctorow terms this “disenshittification” – but it was helmed by one person, Sam Schott, who has every right to move on to other things.

I have never been particularly fond of “shake to undo” on the iPhone. It’s not a pleasant gesture to perform, I feel like typically I don’t have strong enough of a grip on my iPhone to invoke it without fear, and the gesture often undertriggers, requiring an even harder and more cumbersome shake, etc. etc. (One thing I never want to undo is my screen’s pristine surface by having it meet the sidewalk.)

I am aware that many years ago, iOS introduced an alternative: a three-finger swipe. But I feel like Apple flubbed that, also – three fingers are hard to plop onto a small screen, and while regular going back navigation means swiping from left to right, undo is inexplicably a three-finger right-to-left swipe. I mean, okay, it’s explicable – it’s the movement of the cursor before and after the typing is undone. But to my brain that feels less strong than the other association, and undo is not always about typing.

I also see many people not knowing about this alternative and I must not be the only person struggling, since I see more and more apps throw in the towel and put undo and redo as on-screen actions:

Curiously, I even spotted Gmail on desktop doing that recently:

It’s all a welcome improvement under the circumstances, but those are literally all over the place – imagine if on a laptop, each app had a different key shortcut for undo. (We’ve had that, in the 1980s. The 1980s Nostalgia Industrial Complex doesn’t want you to know about stuff like that.)

Anyway, some time ago I promised more onboarding content, and here’s a little thing that happened to me recently. The inciting incident is that I accidentally shook my iPad, and then I saw this:

Wait, does it mean there is yet another, third undo shortcut?

I swiped through the carousel to see these:

None of these feel particularly pleasant to use – although they are nicer on the iPad than on the iPhone – but I started playing with them, and I discovered a fourth entry point. Just a single three-finger tap shows a new-to-me onscreen editing menu, sort of the equivalent of the Edit menu on the desktop:

This works on the iPhone and the iPad, and since then that’s the one thing I did remember and I find using. So, to summarize:

• shake to undo – unpleasant
• double tap with three fingers to undo – unpleasant
• a three-finger swipe to undo – unpleasant, confusing direction
• single tap with three fingers to show a menu, then tap to undo – less unpleasant, but stuck with me

Yeah, even this still doesn’t feel great. But it’s there in a (no pun intended) pinch.

So, is this a success story for onboarding? I think not quite. It all started with an accidental iPad shake, after all, and the gesture I ended up using I also discovered accidentally. But to be fair, I also did learn something, and I think there are some bones of the right solution in here somewhere. Onboarding and in-product education generally feel so bad that even this rickety encounter can be counted as a small victory.

It’s Button Week here on Unsung, and here’s a 10-minute video by Jago Hazzard about the door opening/​closing buttons on London’s tube:

We previously covered elevator buttons and the enduring myth that – at least in America – they are just “pacifiers,” disconnected from the elevator’s systems.

The door opening and closing buttons in London went a different, but no less complex route, having to do with changing expectations, dwell time, and air conditioning. The video also briefly covers how the subway trains changed, which is fun to see.

I have to admit that when a reader wrote to me and said…

Every point release of BBEdit delights me. I live in BBEdit. It’s one of the few packages for which I read through the release notes every time (they often have spots of hilarity).

…I got a bit concerned. One thing that I hate more than wasted release notes (“Bug fixes and performance improvements” is the boilerplate’s boilerplate) is funny release notes – the ones where instead of actually conveying what changed, the text field is used for something, erm, “creative.” (Perhaps most infamously, Medium had had a spell of “fun” release notes about 10 years ago, to a mix of amusement and blowback).

But I needn’t have worried. The release notes of BBEdit are just plain old solid good work, with only a sprinkle of humor:

• The “Zoom” command makes a triumphant return to the Window menu.
• Fixed crash which would occur when displaying completions from language servers which violate the published specification and provide something other than a string for the details field of a returned completion item. (glares at Solargraph)
• SNUCK IN A SPECIAL FEATURE FOR CRAIG NO NOT HIM THE OTHER ONE I HOPE HE LIKES IT

It’s been a while since we looked at release notes, and these are a great example of something that can help you understand not just what an application is, but what it will become. For example, I saw this fly by…

• Made a change in the minimap so that punctuation isn’t greeked, which helps improve visualization.

…and even though I have never used BBEdit, I immediately started nodding. It made sense; greeking is helpful for letters, but I can see how it can do more damage than good for punctuation that has a pretty specific visual signature. BBEdit’s author knows what they’re doing.

Another person (whom you might recognize) chimed in to say:

Nothing in BBEdit is “abandoned.” Everything is on the table for possible improvements. Also remember that this is an app that was originally written for classic Mac OS!

This made me think about what separates apps that you’re excited to keep growing from the apps you’d rather see frozen in time.

The release notes of BBEdit made me trust it so, so quickly. Not just the pace of change and clarity of communication, but also indeed this certain feeling that the product is “alive” in all the right ways. Even if I don’t know or use the features, I quickly get a sense that the changes are for me, or at least other people like me, rather than serving unspecified corporate needs, chasing fashionable trends, or pursuing unnecessary pivots. Hell, even the ratio of changes – new features vs. quality-of-life fixes vs. performance improvements – seems good.

On top of all that, it’s fun to read good release notes, because you can learn something new. These, to me, were fascinating:

• “Entab” and “Detab” have had their names changed to “Convert Spaces to Tabs” and “Convert Tabs to Spaces”, respectively. This is more verbose but less abstruse.

Jargon!

• There is a new setting in the Keyboard preferences: “Enable macOS “Help” key”. This is off by default, so that pressing the “Insert” key which is present on some PC-style keyboards doesn’t open the in-application help. (This frequently happens accidentally.)

Keyboards!

• If an FTP browser window is active and disconnected, “Open from FTP/SFTP Server” will start its connection sheet, rather than doing nothing.

Determinism!

A truly fascinating 17-minute video where Chris Siebert at 100th Coin ventures out to play Super Mario in a way where every single byte of code and every single byte of graphics are used, and then shows his work:

There was something about seeing the visualization of the entirety of the code being “used” that made me sit up:

It reminded me of IBM 1401, the 1959 business computer I saw a lot at the Computer History Museum. It takes up a big chunk of the room…

…but is still so simple that you can watch its console and understand exactly what is going on in its little huge electronic brain:

There’s something very powerful about this and made me imagine a version of it for my code, my CSS, my blog. Even the web lost a lot of its visited link vs. unvisited link fog of war kind of feeling of exploring the space and understanding how it is shaped.

The video gets into the coding weeds in between 2:25 and 13:35 – by the way, isn’t it scary to imagine your code pored over decades later, bugs and hacks and all? – but if you skip this part, make sure to come back at 13:35 for the verdict, and then for the graphics.

Spoiler alert: Some bits of code are never used, but the reasons are fascinating. All the untouched bytes are remnants of shameful mistakes, abandoned decisions, head fakes, and twin protections so strong that their first layer never gets penetrated – each one of them a tiny afterimage of other possible versions of Mario we’ve never gotten.

This is one of the meta posts about this very blog. If that’s not interesting to you, skip to the next one!

Here are some improvements I’ve made to Unsung in recent months. Always curious of your feedback or pointers to places that do these things better!

Weekly emails. I made it so clicking on every (non-YouTube) video or image takes you to the equivalent of the weekly email you’re looking at, but on the web, where you can watch the videos in their natural habitat. It’s scrolled to the right position, so you can just continue reading there.

I’m sorry, I know it isn’t great to shove people outside of their mailbox, but I don’t think there is any way for videos to work well inside emails, and a lot of Unsung is about precise videos. (The only thing allowed is GIFs, and they are really not up to the task.)

Video playback. On that note, I improved the handling and controls of video playback. On mobile, you can tap to play/​pause and swipe left and right to move. On desktop, you can drag the handle, or also swipe left/​right. You can also use ← → keys to advance frame by frame.

My goals are to have video controls that are both minimalistic (for example, never covering the contents) and precise, to match how videos are used here. (But if you tab to the video, it still shows “classic” controls for accessibility.)

Blink comparators. You might have noticed that I added some blink comparators in a few posts where they seemed to be useful (one, two, three, four). Is that fun? Does it work for you? Because I have more ideas for light interactivity on Unsung.

Technical details. Some people asked technical details about specific things on this blog, so I added a technical details page with answers.

Dashboard. If you are interested in that kind of stuff, I added some more charts and stats to Unsung’s internal dashboard (and deprecated sentiment, which wasn’t really working).

From Nilay Patel, a recommendation for the best printer of 2023:

Here’s the best printer in 2023: the Brother laser printer that everyone has. Stop thinking about it and just buy one. It will be fine!

The Brother whatever-it-is will print return labels for online shopping, never run out of toner, and generally be a printer instead of the physical instantiation of a business model. […]

I am telling you to just buy whatever Brother laser printer is on sale and never think about printers again.

Patel did the same in 2024 and 2025 – you should check them all out if you want to smile, because they’re genuinely funny, as are some of the comments:

I’ve been using one of these for 6 years. The low toner indicator came on about 7 months ago. I bought new toner.

Reader, I haven’t replaced anything. It still prints fine, the new toner is still sitting on a shelf somewhere.

Least frustrating printer I’ve ever owned. Would buy again.

I’m sharing these on this ostensibly software-related blog not only because printer enshittification happens primarily via software. I wanted to share it also because this feels very similar to me to the post about TextEdit – a simple and deserved desire to own technology that works without any strange machinations, forced updates, and stress.

The last post about the Nothing Phone not buffering its button presses reminded me of something.

Here’s IBM Selectric, a 1961 typewriter:

Past decades get compressed into a singular point in time, so we might all think of Selectric as “yet another old typewriter,” and I definitely did before learning about it. But the Selectric came 80 years after the first typewriters, and it packed so much user-benefitting innovation it really was an iPhone of its time. (Alas, I don’t believe there was a matching “are you getting it?!” keynote.)

Selectric was, honestly, a triumph of engineering. It popularized swappable typewriter fonts, showcased good industrial design, enabled jam-free typing, and even invented – although that came a decade after its introduction – an actual destructive Backspace. Crucially, on day one, its typing experience was so fantastic that many of the keys on keyboards we’re using 60 years later are still in the same place Selectric put them.

What’s even more impressive? Selectric was purely electromechanical. It had no software, no chips, and no electronics. Everything it has accomplished was expressed in the mechanical language of steel, grease, links, and levers.

Here’s one problem that’s trivial in software, but hard in hardware: How do you prevent people from pressing two keys at the same time?

This is a thing that plagued typewriters since day one, and IBM’s engineers came up with a smart solution: each key was connected to a bar (interposer), each bar had a little protruding notch (lug), and that notch would smoothly dip into a little horizontal row of steel balls (selector compensator tube).

The balls had just enough wiggle room for one notch, so if you tried to press a second key at the same time, the balls would now be packed tight, there would be no room to accommodate the second notch, and the key press would be blocked.

I thought that was really clever, but it was even more clever than that. If you read my essay, you know it starts with the very notion that fingers overlap: as one is going up, often another one is already pressing down. If you were to block any second press before the first press was completely done, you wouldn’t be able to type very fast – and Selectric was meant to be a professional typing tool.

Here’s where the choice of the carefully sized and arranged steel balls came into play. In practice, the second press was not completely blocked. The lug was able to slide just a little bit in between the adjacent steel balls. It was a half press – or, effectively, a half-character buffer. It was all fine-tuned just enough to not impede overlapping typing, while still offering protection from two keys at the same time.

Now, if Selectric did this, in a universe where creating even a half-character buffer meant a little row of carefully machined steel balls, and added weight, and anticipating future wear and tear, and multiple pages in the maintenance manuals… what’s your excuse?

One thing I was (and still am) worried about when it comes to my recent big interactive essay is that by showing all these classic desktop examples, the whole thing might appear old-fashioned, relevant only to a bygone era.

Yet, the challenges it shows are universal. Here’s something I just spotted. This is how you rotate an image on an iPhone and on a Nothing Phone:

It’s a pretty standard control – tap once to rotate counterclockwise, tap a second time to do it again, etc. – with a helpful transition of the photo’s orientation so that you don’t lose yours.

Now, I’m going to exaggerate the problem a bit and tap 90-degree rotation quickly eight times. Eight times should result in what engineers call a “no op” – the image rotating twice in full, and ending up where it started. That indeed happens on the iPhone:

But it’s a different story on the Nothing Phone/​Android:

iPhone will remember and buffer the taps, so that the second, pending rotation will happen as soon as the first is done. The Nothing Phone button gives you a tap confirmation via both haptics and sound, and then ignores the tap if a previous rotation is still animating.

Why does it matter?

I often keep thinking about the framework of situational disability, stating that disability is not just something that happens to a few people and no one else. No, pretty much everyone will occasionally encounter a situation that will make them effectively disabled, and this is why accessibility matters much more than many of us assume:

I think similarly about casual and non-casual use. Photo-taking on phones is typically casual. Phone cameras are typically very good at detecting the photo orientation – but get confused when you’re pointing down. Now, as an example, if you had to take photos of a bunch of landscape documents, you might end up having to rotate dozens of photos, one by one. And it would be so much more predictable and pleasant if you could just tap the button three times at any pace you wanted without thinking, without paying attention, without getting your UI blocked by an animation that no longer helps you.

This is, I suppose, “situational power user-ness.” Given a long enough timeframe – or, in this case, a large enough population – even a casual interface like phone photo editing (or, GarageBand) will meet someone who will have no choice but to treat it more seriously and expect more from it.

By the way, buffering the taps is not the only answer. You can also stop/​accelerate the animation after an interrupting tap, and it seems the iPhone does that as well. But the rule is: never force the user to wait for the animation to finish.

I liked this page I just learned of called Incomplete List of Mistakes in the Design of CSS. It might not mean much to you if you don’t write CSS, but could be fun to check out if you do. Here are some choice quotes:

• border-radius should have been corner-radius.
• It shouldn’t be !important — that reads to engineers as “not important”. We should have picked another way to write this.
• white-space: nowrap should be white-space: no-wrap.

It reminded me of a similar list called Known Anomalies in Unicode Character Names. Here’s one example:

U+02C7 CARON
U+030C COMBINING CARON

The “caron” should have been called hacek and combining hacek. The term “caron” is suspected by some to be an invention of some early standards body, but it has also been claimed by others to have been in use at Linotype before the days of digital typography. Its true origin may be lost in the mists of time.

These are great because they simply say “this is how we messed up.” They are succinct and candid about problems. More work needs to be done at this point, of course – the CSS list only really contains the “simple,” low-level observations, and I think for both CSS and Unicode fixes cannot simply be made because people and systems rely on the existing behaviour – but the first step is admitting you have a problem, right?

If you’re on the outside, it can be comforting to realize “oh, it wasn’t just me, other people don’t like this, too.” (Scanning bug reports from other users can help in a similar way.) If you’re on the inside, consider making a list like this for a long-standing project. It might do you or your team good!

If you are aware of more documents like these, I’d love if you could send them over.

A fun (and funny!) 9-minute video from Linternet User about designing a perfect onscreen lever with the right amount of juice:

Love seeing real work in progress like that, plus it ends up in a place I didn’t expect.

It was also great to see “delay and snap” action elucidated so clearly. It feels like a variant of rubberbanding (or, elastic scrolling) where you intentionally disconnect an object from the cursor or finger dragging it.

A nice and I think effective notification preview in Retro, with a verbatim sample text of a notification right below its name:

Not only you can see exactly what you’re going to get and make a much better-informed decision, but the app even uses actual names of your in-app contacts, so you can relate to the notifications more.