Thank you to everyone who answered the call for good software updates from last week. I received so many nominations that the list below is severely narrowed down, but I appreciated every response!

I grouped the answers in sections I saw emerge organically, I included links to apps, and did some light editing for clarity. (You can always explore more answers on Mastodon and Bluesky.)

I hope you find this inspiring in some way – I know I did! – or at least enjoyable.

Something I asked for

People shared examples of improvements they particularly asked for, improvements that meant something for people close to them, or even simply seeing people given credit for ideas:

I’m a space educator and bring a mobile planetarium in schools. I use a piece of open source software called Gaia Sky. It is developed by only one developer, and I seem to be one of only a handful of people in the issue queue requesting updates. Always a prompt and incredible reply from the developer.

I filed a request: “In my shows, I tell the audience that the rings of Saturn are made of bits of ice, rock, and dust. Then when I fly through, it shows a mostly 2D ring system. Has [making the rings use particles instead] been considered before?” I made the issue on February 12, and by May 11 had a Saturn ring system with thousands of little rocks and pebbles running smoothly in my planetarium dome. Kids loved it.

Earlier this year I contacted Fantastical’s Flexibits requesting that hiding an event was accessible through the menu bar, not only in the contextual menu. Few weeks later, they emailed me to let me know the feature was coming in the following release.

The dev behind OpenStreet Browser listened to my feedback and added a filter item to a more logical category.

The recent SailfishOS update brought back the weather app and implemented Bluetooth for the Android support. Both of those are things my dad asked for, so I was quite happy! :)

The [social network] Pachli developer is amazing, the care he puts on everything, and mentioning every people that was involved on new ideas/​fixes/improvements/​translations... I do not remember others doing it. It’s great.

Every Pachli update is a prove of something great happened/is happening... Increases the hope world count a little.

I enjoyed using Easy CSV Editor and JSON Editor by VDT Labs in 2020-ish. Unfortunately, JSON Editor was macOS-only at the time while Easy CSV Editor was also available on iOS. So I contacted the guy behind VDT Labs, and asked whether he planned publishing an iOS version of JSON Editor anytime soon.

He got back to me immediately, said he didn’t have any plans, but liked the idea. He asked for my opinion on a few decisions he’d have to make, then published an iOS app literally weeks later. I love using his software. […] When you published I trust in TextEdit, his stuff came to mind immediately despite getting the occasional feature here and there. It’s nothing flashy, but the apps are simply reliable and haven’t changed much at all.

Apps that are updated respectfully, without changing too many things

On that last note…

The last AntennaPod UI update looked great, but didn’t force me to re-learn how it works. It has remained stable from a UX standpoint for as long as I have been using it.

I use the Infuse app primarily on the Apple TV (but also on the Mac and iPad occasionally) and I’m constantly impressed at their singular commitment to deliver on making their app useful for its users in all sorts of small thoughtful ways on an ongoing basis. Most recently it was supporting Plex and Jellyfin-style folder/​file naming conventions for movie extras.

The only upgrade that always pleases me is a major Debian release. actually I’m happy because it’s been a rock for more than 20 years for me. I hate how everything is perpetually changing in IT nowadays. Debian doesn’t. The only change I fondly remember is when zfs integration got easier.

Updates that showed developers cared about more groups of people than just mainstream

Pachli’s update to include pronouns of the posters in the timestream.

OCR on macOC and iOS expanded into Swedish a while back. Super useful, especially on OS level, so all apps can use it.

Not sure what version, but the recent macOS that added made-for iPhone hearing aid support made a huge difference in my work life.

TL; DR: Apple established a standard for “made for iPhone” hearing aids that pair directly to iPhones quite a few years ago, but it’s only recently (in the post M1 era) where Macs have supported the same protocol. It means that calls and other audio from my work Mac go directly to my aids, without needing a clunky intermediary device worn around the neck. Since I need to wear the aids anyway, it means seamless access to audio. It’s just such a nice quality of life improvement.

An update that made an app better for me was the recent addition of flood warnings to Watch Duty. I have a mountain cabin in California but my main home is now in coastal North Carolina. I installed, and pay for, Watch Duty for warnings on California fires, but I can now also use it for warnings about North Carolina flooding, which can happen during tropical storms.

Updates that felt genuinely focused on helping users

The grocery list/​recipe keeper/​meal planner app AnyList. They just added “leftovers” tags and recipe queues to a recent update and my wife’s over the moon. It meshes perfectly with how her brain operates.

It has not been made fully public, but I am playing with the preview release of [font editor] Glyphs. And it’s great: Huge number of small fixes all around, but the whole UI has been revamped to match the macOS latest. Running variable fonts for testing is so much easier with an axes slider. Lots of editing tweaks that make things much easier. Genuinely nice and useful stuff, they pay attention and listen.

Every upgrade to Halide has made me happy. I can’t think of a specific change but every upgrade seems like it does better what a camera app should do: have stuff where your finger needs to go without thinking about it. Anything that helps my finger hit the right place at the right moment without thinking it’s a win. I think a camera app is the ultimate example of cognitive load mattering.

I’ve been building different things with [web framework] Web Origami and the most recent 0.7.0 beta release allowed me to do a lot of things I couldn’t before.

The creator is an absolute pleasure to work with. He listens to folks using the tool. Every update is gold and makes meaningful improvements based on how people are actually using it.

[Window manager] Niri consistently has extremely well thought and well implemented out features. Many of them are things that I hadn’t even considered wanting from a window manager that I now can’t live without.

Every update I have ever received for the Android application Kanji Study has been delightful. Chase Colburn does a great job with steadily improving the app and adding great new features. There are a bunch of little UI flourishes in it that I think you’d like. The kind of thing that comes from a tight loop between developer and users, smoothing off the edges that provide friction.

Something that comes to mind is the way it implements history. If I clicked on one of the characters in the Kanji listing for 美人, it would take me to the page for that kanji, and it’s easy to end up down a short rabbit hole if you’re the kind of person who enjoys leafing through a dictionary semi-randomly. But there’s a good history functionality that makes it a breeze to get back, and you can jump to an arbitrary point in that history instead of mashing “back” until you get to where you want to be. That’s not award-winning design, but it’s good design.

Updates to core stuff that never asks for limelight

Flighty: I don’t think I’ve seen a team work so hard to get the core use of their app nailed perfectly. No enshittification, no horrific UI changes. Their most recent update just further enhances what they’re great at.

[Painting app] Krita’s latest version has on screen text editing and it’s a very welcome addition to an already great tool!

I don’t know how recent it was, but the one for macOS where you can cut and paste text from images was a real pleasure to encounter.

When [3D modeler] FreeCad hit 1.0 – lots of small improvements in the sketching workbench made an area of the app you spend lots of time in so much nicer.

I’m thinking of the Transit trip planning app, which I love! There’s a bug fix for a problem where you would be en route, then looking at a different app on your phone, then come back to find out that the Transit had been killed in the background, and you had to restart your trip planning. That was a definite problem and i’m excited to hear that it’s been fixed!

I was also reading about the big design update they put out last year, which i continue to enjoy and get a lot of use out of. :)

Overcast! Recent update that added selectable text, and generally they made some good stability improvements recently.

[Text editor] Zed once had “improved font rendering on Linux” in the release notes and the text really looked better after the update.

I really want to share the Fantastical Calendar Mirroring feature. I have happily paid for Fantastical for years. And over that time I have paid for some calendar mirroring tools, none of which I liked for the money. Now I get a streamlined mirroring feature in the app I already love. It was a total surprise too!

I have used Fantastical for years now and, when I had to switch to using a Windows desktop at work last spring, I downloaded the released-but-still-under-development Fantastical for Windows app. I was accustomed to changing the visible calendar group on macOS using Ctrl+1 and would often try it out of habit, even though it wasn’t implemented on the Windows version yet. In fact, I would even mentally convert the macOS Ctrl+1 command to Windows-speak and type Alt+1. Then one day earlier this year, Alt+1 actually changed my calendar group. Much to my surprise, I had again typed the shortcut, despite it doing absolutely nothing many times before, and found that Flexibits had not only added a keyboard shortcut for that setting, they had added the keyboard shortcut I knew to expect coming from macOS.

When did iOS add document scanning with OCR? iOS 17? 18? Much better to use a phone instead of a dedicated scanner for periodic receipt scanning, plus the document then syncs to a Mac.

[Text editor] BBEdit 16 has some nice quality-of-life improvements, like per-project colour settings, which might help me to avoid accidentally making changes to the wrong version of a project, something I’ve done more than once.

This is a sad, sad commentary on my life choices in general, but i happen to be really glad that a recent Outlook for Mac update gained the ability to import PST files. [Legal software] eDiscovery still exports in PST format, so until this feature launched you had another step (or more, depending on your method) in getting exported mail back into a mailbox that lives on a Mac.

App makers working hard on developing trust in ongoing updates

The Playdate game console. They do such a great job adding joy and functionality to the platform with each software update. I continue to love the music and thoughtful interactions throughout, but more specifically the recent-ish update they added to the game browser, adding in folders and improving access to games on the system.

Cities: Skylines II has been on an incredible upward trajectory ever since Paradox gave the game to Iceflake. Optimization, features, just overall feel of the game have all improved since they took over at the start of the year. It’s a great redemption arc for a game that many people want to be great, but fell short in its first few years.

[RSS reader] NetNewsWire: every update does something genuinely useful like action log in one of the latest updates, so I can see what’s the problem if feed update takes suspiciously long time.

Wrike Desktop for Windows: very much a rolling release model, they do a monthly update, and I’m just happy when my work applications don’t break or get a bunch of BS added that I didn’t need (just didn’t want to use enshittification twice in one email). The most recent update was minor, some field admin changes and some further detailed reporting. Can’t beat that.

The release notes I’m always excited for are Zen Browser. They’ve been cranking through a roadmap of user-focused features, and their design is opinionated about it. Not always right, mind, but with strong convictions. Recently, improvements around tab tiling and the addition of “boosts” – color scheme and element zapping without an extension.

Stripe continually improves. it’s the SaaS vendor I use and am most pleased by. Every few months they add a new feature and I usually react “ah, that’s good” and “wow, their documentation is so good I can decide if I want to implement this and implementation will be so easy”

The team at [map software] QGIS consistently makes the app better with each release. Over the years I’ve made my peace with a dorky OSS interface and I appreciate that this isn’t being continually reinvented. Meanwhile, they’re keeping up with all the changes and movements in geospatial tech and ensuring that updates to key packages make their way in.

Let’s hear it for game devs who do free content+QoL updates for years after release. No Man’s Sky is the poster child here, but I’m constantly amazed by the number of indies who substantially add to the game experience long after they’ve been paid. (And yes, I know this helps sell the game + DLCs). I think Criterion’s Burnout Paradise was the first to really surprise me this way. IIRC they didn’t add much content for free (maybe a couple of game modes?), but they overhauled the UI completely.

Yeah, Pachli and [browser] Vivaldi came to my mind too. These are the ones that I’m not afraid to update, and while they were great already, somehow they are still getting better and better.

the Typeface app for MacOS continues to be a spark of joy for me. Recent updates have added a nice font pairings tool and thoughtful UI updates. I always look forward to new updates from this dev.

[Personal finance app] YNAB! This one has been the most consistent over the past few years for me. It feels like every single update just made it so much better. They added a summary home screen, removed some fluff, and added even more reflection features which is really convenient for a budget app.

App makers that feel like they’re going against the current bad trends

For me, every [photo gallery] Ente update so far was a significant improvement and going in the direction I’d like things to go. Recently, I was positively surprised by the new offline gallery feature to use Ente without account from March this year – refreshingly different from where most projects are heading.

NetNewsWire 7 required macOS Tahoe when it came out, but was in a later update made compatible with previous macOS, Sequoia.

[Personal database] Obsidian — one change that was fun.

The folks at FernCRM made their platform AI-optional. They basically will turn off all the AI features if you don’t want them. And for the folks who use those features a tiny bit, they offer selective metering so you don’t have to pay for everything if you don’t use everything.

I literally canceled a premium subscription to a software I liked because it was mandatory and weirdly intrusive. People appreciate choices!

Pretty much any [social network server] GoToSocial update falls into that category for me. [Software framework] Forgejo updates do as well.
I found that projects with a strong anti-AI policy generally deliver delightful updates. I wonder if there’s a correlation. (I really don’t, there is.)

The excellent [podcast app] Pocket Casts just launched generated chapters in podcasts. They’re automatically added with (whisper it) AI, but that doesn’t matter. They just work and are surprisingly useful and delightful to use. This isn’t an “AI feature” - it’s a feature that just happens to have been made possible because of AI.

I find myself looking at the chapters of almost every podcast I listen to now as a sort of preview and taster and navigation menu. Helps me decide if I want to commit to the whole episode or just skip to a particular section. Wonderful stuff. I didn’t realise it would be such a valuable addition until it was added and I started using it. I’ve attached a screenshot from a recent episode of Blair Braverman’s brilliant What To Carry, What To Burn pod (which I can also recommend).

Updates that are presented well and fun to explore

We chatted about good release notes before, and here are some more good updates – ones designed that exude some amount of healthy pride, and ones that people simply enjoy reading.

Every [3D software] Blender and [gaming engine] Godot release brings tons of cool new stuff to play with, and their release notes pages are delightful too! [Blender release notes + Godot release notes]

The first thing that makes me happy is how pretty the notes look. They’re not a boring list of changes.

Soulver 4’s release notes were great: an overview of the new features followed by examples / documentation of how to use them.

I also enjoy reading This Week in Plasma for [Linux distribution] KDE, even if I don’t use it much and it’s not release notes strictly speaking, but the fact they explain what and why they did is so cool.

Apps that don’t pressure people to update

The most delightful part of the [calculator app] Soulver update is that they’re still doing major paid versions (not subscription).

Soulver 2 and 3 never stopped working. (I never got to use Soulver 1, so can’t speak to that.) In fact, the email that announced v4 said: “Please note, there’s no pressure to upgrade if you’re happy staying with Soulver 3, which you can continue to download from here.”

Ever since I started using Blender a few years back, every update has been solid, well documented, and focused on improvements to real things its users care about. Whenever I check the release notes it’s like: “new geometry nodes! more cycles renderer optimizations! more compositor features!” Even if this post jinxes it and the next release has all kinds of AI garbage grafted onto it, it will also never force me to update.

Particular updates that stuck in my memory

I really liked this section:

You asked for recent, but about 30 years ago I got a BIOS upgrade which fixed a bug in the HD driver and made it quicker. That was sweet.

I was just thinking the other day about how the MKII version of Roland’s MC-500 sequencer software is still one of the most joyous software updates I can ever recall. This was in like 1987 or something.

The details are somewhat lost in the mists of time but I just remember getting a whole boatload of new functionality, some of which I didn’t even know I needed, and yet it all fitted perfectly within the conventions established by v1 so there was nothing new to learn in terms of the UI. Amazing stuff for what was essentially a numerical keypad and a few function keys.

The MkII software came out when they released MkII hardware – but was completely compatible with my MkI. That was the big joy about it, getting all the great new features without having to obsolete/​upgrade my hardware. (I think it even came with a sticker to put over the logo.) Can you imagine that?!

I hope you’ll forgive me breaking the rules a little bit, but one of my favourites ever was Super Mario Brothers 3.

Let’s pretend as we all should that Super Mario Brothers 2 never existed and look at SMB3 as a sequel that fixed so many things from SMB:

• You could now go backwards in a level in case you missed something
• You could replay a level you’ve already cleared to explore and find new things
• You had a place to put power-ups for later
• You could freaking fly

Perhaps that’s the dream – to release an update so good that the users think about forever.

In this 7-minute video, kaptainkristian talks about the fascinating process of making Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the pre-CGI hybrid animation/​live action movie from 1988:

This is called “bumping the lamp” – a phrase coined by Disney during the production of Roger Rabbit to describe going above and beyond what was expected of the animators.

It would’ve been perfectly feasible if Roger stayed flatly illuminated throughout this scene like a cartoon normally would, but instead the animators put in the time to shade every cell uniquely so that the practical light would bounce off from the same way it would a physical object.

And they had to account for that dynamically shifting lighting with every contour in Roger’s limbs, his clothes, his face, the cast shadow he creates on the environment as well as the texture of the light, the slightest difference in color temperatures, the lamp sways… even Roger’s ears have a slight translucency, since they’re much thinner than the rest of his body. They thought of that.

Audiences had no expectation for this level of realism in 1988, but all these seemingly-superfluous details help sell the effect at a subconscious level.

“Bumping the lamp” can be seen on two interlocking levels: one that focuses on the quality of the output (as above), and one that focuses on process toward personal mastery of craft.

On that second level, here’s an anecdote from the original Mac team, a few years earlier:

One day Burrell started doing something radical. Andy came by my cube and said “You’ve got to come see what Burrell’s doing with Defender.” “How can you innovate with a video game?” I wondered. I’d seen Burrell and Andy innovate on all kinds of things, but I couldn’t image how he could somehow step outside the box of a video game - the machine controlled the flow and dictated the goals. How could you gain some control in that environment?

We started up a new competition, and when Burrell’s turn came up, he did something that stunned me. He immediately shot all his humans! This was completely against the goal of the game! He didn’t even go after the aliens, and when he shot the last human, they all turned to mutants and attacked him from all sides. He glanced in my direction with a grin on his face and said “Make a mess, clean it up!” and proceeded to dodge the swarm of angry mutants noisily chasing after him.

I am neither a good visual/​motion person, nor a great gamer. But I recognize this desire to once in a while walk up to a pool and throw yourself into a deep end of it, out of principle. Sometimes when I start a new project, I choose a different framework or method I haven’t used before, just so things are harder. On Aresluna and here on Unsung, I very deliberately chose “no centering” as an arbitrary principle, just to push myself to embrace the – harder, but more rewarding – asymmetry, and see where that takes me.

I am sharing this just after I shared the other maxim because I believe in those more that I believe in style guides or design principles coming “from above.” I see craft blossom when it can flow from individuals, and when the organization and attendant processes recognize that. Let people bump the lamp, make a mess, feel certain way about weird things, and do other things – and then let others observe, learn from that, and share the strange rituals and arbitrary rules that make them try harder when no one’s asking for that.

Thanks to Jon Wiley for sharing the original video.

If you want to record the screen from your iPhone on your Mac, open the QuickTime Player app but ignore New Screen Recording, and click on New Movie Recording instead.

This instruction is a fever dream of three weird things in sequence:

• What on earth is “QuickTime”?
• I am recording with a player?
• Why can’t I choose the option that describes exactly what I want to do?

It’s interesting to me to think how we got here:

• QuickTime is a 1990s brand, an offshoot of QuickDraw. Instead of QuickAnimate or QuickPlay, Apple called it QuickTime because it felt cute: time is what separates static images from video. The branding was much more prominent in the 1990s and 2000s, but mostly fell out of use – searching for “quicktime” in system settings today, for example, yields zero results.

• Long ago, the Player was the only free, consumer-facing part of QuickTime, so it needed special branding. You could purchase QuickTime Pro – you would even get aggressive ad banners for it inside Mac OS! – and its encoding and saving capabilities would then be sprinkled across the entire system.

• “New Movie Recording” originally offered recording from external video cameras (like iSight, another cute name). “New Screen Recording” was added later, for recording from internal screens. My guess is that technically, architecturally, or both, it was easier to treat external screens (like iPhone or Apple TV) as external video cameras since the UI and affordances matched them more closely. So that’s why screen recording from external devices ended up under “New Movie Recording.”

As a UX historian, this is fun and fascinating! I love tracing back that kind of stuff and learning how certain strange things came to be.

As a user… not so much.

“If you want to record the screen from your iPhone on your Mac, open the QuickTime Player app but ignore New Screen Recording, and click on New Movie Recording instead.”

This feels thrice arbitrary, closer to a magical incantation than a computer command, requiring you to hold a bunch of counterintuitive things in your head, or look them up every time. “Wait, what was the strange name?“ “Yeah, it’s called a player, but that’s ok.” “Hmm, I remember something about not choosing the obvious command.“

I have this internal rule that a flow or a space in the UI should have at most one weird thing. I can’t prove it to you mathematically, and I would be the first to find exceptions to my own rule. But one weird thing makes me nervous, and two or more weird things in concert raise the hair at the back of my neck. Two weird things is when the “launch blocking” bulb lights up in my head. Work needs to happen to bring the weirdness count back to 1 or 0.

This is one example of what I dragged Apple earlier for: it’s not just speed that matters. It’s noticing this kind of complexity, places where an easy way was chosen, design debt accumulated, and things got simply too weird. Apple allowed three weird things to accumulate here.

(By the way, delightful weird doesn’t count! But it’s hard for me to imagine anyone defending these three things above as delightful or positive in any way.)

“If you want to record the screen from your iPhone on your Mac, open the QuickTime Player app but ignore New Screen Recording, and click on New Movie Recording instead.”

“If you want to record the screen from your iPhone on your Mac, open the Recorder app and click on New Screen Recording.”

It’s not trivial to get to this or something similar, but it’s also not really hard. You can get rid of weird things, but you need to want it.

This is a design joke that always makes me laugh:

This was made by… someone, a while back, I believe in response to the Twitter logo redesign of 2012, which showed the new logomark as composed of exclusively circles:

Now, to be clear: that Twitter logo redesign was gorgeous, and I do not particularly care if it was designed out of circles or whatever else. I don’t even think its announcement was presented in an overly pretentious way – it was nowhere near the 2008 bloviating Pepsi redesign or the rank amateurism of Yahoo’s 2013 logo.

It’s just… design can be so pretentious and up its own golden-ratioed ass, and I can’t help but love anything piercing that bubble. (In my perfect, naïve world, Doug Bowman – the designer behind the logo – also finds the joke hilarious!)

Also, I feel like design is just not… funny, all that often. Quick, think of any product design joke.

See what I mean?

I can’t, either. My favourite graphic design joke is “if it’s big and ugly, it’s not big enough.” (You know, it’s funny because it’s sad.)

Immich is a self-hosted photo/​video app, and one of their side pages is Cursed Knowledge:

Cursed knowledge we have learned as a result of building Immich that we wish we never knew.

There is something about this format that I really enjoyed as a reflection but also as a way to share with others – simple one sentence/​paragraph updates with links, so you can inhale quickly but also go deep if needed. There’s some overlap with bugs here, but it’s not necessarily only buggy stuff – also quirks of formats, observations, etc.

I made a cursed knowledge page for Unsung – let me know!

Thanks to Casey Gollan for posting about the original page.

Over on Bluesky, Melanie Walsh asks:

Favorite and least favorite file formats? I’ll start.

Favorite: TXT
Least favorite: HEIC

The answers – both replies and quote posts – are really interesting because most of the time they’re not about inherent capabilities of each format, but:

• how well supported it is in the general ecosystem?
• how painful it was last time I used it?
• who’s using it and for what?
• if there is one app I use it with, do I like this app? (interesting in the context of PDFs which some people love, and others hate)

Of course, Walsh put a finger on the scale with her initial example, but HEIC stands out as a favorite least favorite. I understand this is mostly out of its limited support, raising a question whether Apple spent the right amount of time socializing and incentivizing its adoption – even on a Mac, you can’t escape blank stares the moment you drag it into many websites/web apps:

HEIC on the other hand, Apple’s way of making photos smaller and everything else more complicated than it needs to be.

By the way HEIC is when you drag a picture from your Notes app into your email, and then it laughs in your face and is like sorry, girl, I’m HEIC!! I don’t do things like that!!

I didn’t know I had a least favorite file format but yeah HEIC can fuck right off

Sweet fucking hell fuck heic into the sun

Reading the replies here makes me feel like I live in an oddly privileged bubble in an inverse of the usual meaning of privilege for being a poor Android-using mfer who has never seen a HEIC in their life and had to actually look that sh*t up.

Least favorite is a toss up between HEIC (WHICH NOBODY ASKED FOR, APPLE) and WEBP

Controversial but I hope everyone involved with HEIC only tastes soap instead of cilantro forever

I agree with this person that WebP is much better supported than it used to, but it sometimes takes one link in the chain – cough Google Docs cough – for you to avoid a format forever. And, those are always lagging indicators. If a format didn’t work once in an important flow, it might take many years before you come back:

all the people saying “webp” in the quotes might as well be fighting WW2 still. look for another grievance. please

Some other fun answers:

IF IT’S CALLED [C]OMMA [S]EPARATED [V]ALUES WHY DO I HAVE TO OPEN A WINDOW AND CHANGE THE DEFAULT DELIMITER OPTION FROM TAB TO COMMA ??!?!?!

Favorite: MP3 (invented piracy, patents all expired, doesn’t need an FPU)
Least favorite: DICOM (nightmarish metadata, too many possible image encodings, when it wants a 3D volume the solution is just “a bunch of files in a folder”, also IT IS A NETWORK PROTOCOL >:( )

Least fave: .R01, .R02, etc... – nothing needs to be split into multiple rar files! Please stop! The world has moved beyond this.

Least favorite: can I count those awful pointer doc types Google uses, like .gdoc and .gsheet

favorite: transparent PNG
least favorite: transparent PNG that is not really transparent but just a fuckin checkered background

I forgot about this meme:

For least fav I voted for GIF, having not only spent countless hours trying to make good-looking animated gifs that do not weigh tens of megabytes, look horrible, and cause performance issues… but also having worked on two different products (Medium and Figma) that had to swallow gifs made by others, and seeing engineers lose their minds peeking into their insides and how messy they were.

To be fair, GIF comes from the late 1980s, and simply outlived its purpose. It’s a fascinating format that literally deserves a book written about it: the messy patent wars, the pronunciation, the technical format and many surprises hiding inside, even the word “gifs” transcending the format itself to mean “short animated memes.”

To go back to the thread, a small pattern that I also encountered from time to time:

Least favorite: .md, specifically when it’s used for Sega Genesis game roms. There’s already a type of text file type called .md, so Windows tries to open them in notepad. Just call it .gen instead, nerd.

Favorite: TS, the one that opens in my IDE
Least Favorite: TS, the one that opens in Quicktime

Lastly, because of course someone had to do it:

Favorite: Gaylord Archival® Reinforced Acid Free Manilla
Least favorite: Office Depot Vertical Hanging Folders

I’m endlessly confounded (as a user) and fascinated (as a designer) when it comes the shortcut conventions in Google’s professional web apps.

They seem… bad, but bad in a strange, inexplicable, enthralling way. Previously, we encountered this:

The lessons there were, primarily: don’t… do this, and also maybe don’t show it like this.

Today’s entrant, from Google Drive, offers a different lesson:

Immediately, I have so many questions. Why a sequenced shortcut instead of something simpler, in a space where there aren’t that many shortcuts? Why Control of all things? On a Mac? Why is it so different than Google Docs in every way – don’t you all talk to each other? And why not a proper typographical symbol for Control (^ is not ⌃)?

But there is also a mechanical lesson here. I’d encourage you to actually press any of these three shortcuts, and watch your fingers doing that. I bet you will observe one of two ways:

• ⌃ down, C down, C up, ⌃ up, F down, F up
• ⌃ down, C down, C up, F down, F up, ⌃ up

Turns out, people are messy when it comes to modifier keys. That messiness was even encouraged from the very first day we breathed life into the very first modifier key. Most of 20th century typewriters had a full stop and a comma on both shifted and unshifted positions – pressing Shift was heavy early on, and this helped when punctuating all-caps sentences or preparing for a capital letter starting the next sentence. (Also, Shift Lock wasn’t as smart as Caps Lock is.)

But even without that encouragement there are still two legitimately valid ways to understand “^C then F” – you release ⌃ before the second key, or after – but Google Drive only listens to the first one. Couple this with giving you zero feedback after ⌃C, and I won’t be surprised if many people try this sequence once, and give up assuming it’s just not working. So, it feels it’d be good to think about being extra forgiving here, the same way it’s good to think about “coyote time.”

As always, please let me know if you see the method in this alleged madness. After all, the goal for this blog is not to blindly ridicule things, but to learn together through thick and thin.

Somewhere next to optimistic loading and optimistic saving exists another technique to make apps feel faster: optimistic committing.

Flickr is a great example. After navigating to photo upload, you enter a sort of a foyer where you can drag in the photos, reorder them, name and tag them, and otherwise prepare them before pressing the big Upload button.

But Flickr also optimistically assumes you will press that button, and slowly starts uploading the heavy photos in the background the moment you drag them in.

Like all optimistic schemes, being friendlier toward the user complicates things for Flickr’s designers and engineers. After all, there is still a regular upload modal after you do commit to the upload…

…so the two states – quiet staging area upload, and the official visible upload – have to be reconciled and kept in sync.

Also, optimistic but eventually cancelled uploads have to be cleaned up from the servers.

Lastly, there’s signposting. Contrary to lighter optimistic loading schemes, which typically simplify reality by pretending no data transfer is actually happening, the optimistic committing here is actually visible through small indicators:

I think this transparency is welcome. In the past, Meta (who else!) got into hot water for abusing optimistic committing:

Did you ever record a video on Facebook to post directly to your friend’s wall, only to discard the take and film a new version? You may have thought those embarrassing draft versions were deleted, but Facebook kept a copy. The company is blaming it on a “bug” and swears that it’s going to delete those discarded videos now. They pinkie promise this time.

In this context, it’s good that Flickr conveys data is being sent to the servers; I believe this helps with building trust.

On top of transparency, I think it’s also good that this process shows the progress of uploading with a lot of precision – not just between files, but also within each file. Internet connection speeds vary so much, not just geographically, but also even situationally, that this is really helpful in practice. There are many moments where auto saving to the cloud needn’t bother the user unless the connection goes offline for a longer while, but this feels like a situation where clarity is better than magic.

When I was at Medium, over a decade ago, I really enjoyed going deep on typography.

People seemed to generally enjoy what we did. Writers really loved automatic em dashes and range dashes, discovered the beauty of hanging punctuation, and as funny as it might sound today, the smart quotes were a huge hit, too. I was proud of the tight drop caps, the underlines brought me some notoriety, and we even supported ligatures at a time when not only this wasn’t the default, but it also had some mildly scary performance consequences.

But for every two things that worked well, there was also something that in retrospect proved to be me trying too hard, and had to be quickly undone.

I was really excited about resurrecting pilcrows, but many users saw them as rendering or escaping errors.

I briefly added vulgar fractions to all the places where Medium rounded numbers, but that made those numbers confusing and weird in practice.

(And I already mentioned the strange, rare bug with system fonts, although I suppose there are always bugs.)

It was an interesting calibration process. And somewhere in between successes and failures was one thing that I have never mentioned before, and one nobody ever brought up.

I recently shared the story of 2015’s typographical redesign of Medium. As we were exploring the candidate typefaces, we fell in love with one in particular: Charter, a font designed by the industry legend Matthew Carter – and no, this is not a bug, Google Search switches to using Carter’s own Verdana to honor him.

Charter had this perfect balance of “casual” and “refined” we wanted for Medium at the time. Unsurprisingly, it also came with a bunch of typographical niceties – among them lowercase (old-style) digits, which I really wanted:

But there was a problem. Those lowercase numerals came with a “medieval 1,” a particular style of a lowercase digit 1 that resembled an uppercase I. People hated it and were confused by it, thinking indeed that a bug caused a letter I to make its way to the numbers.

No amount of pleading would get us to push that digit through. The backup plan was going with uppercase numerals, but I hated the idea; those digits felt so ugly and pedestrian to me – they were not just uppercase, but also monospace! It was a frustrating situation, being so close and yet separated from a warm Charter embrace by one glyph that it didn’t happen to have.

And so… I drew one.

I, someone who has never ever designed a typeface, decided to vandalize Matthew “The Most Widely Read Man In The World” Carter’s typeface and plop in a new digit 1 of my own creation.

The internal complaints stopped. Weeks later, we launched the new fonts, Charter front and center, my fresh non-medieval 1 attached. I don’t remember the exact details, but we found a way to do this that was compatible with the font’s licensing – and yet I never talked about it because… well, I think you can understand why.

I believe my rogue 1 lasted until a subsequent redesign in 2022, long after I left the company. A decade in, I still don’t know how to feel about it. Did I save Charter as a candidate for Medium by mutilating it a bit, am I writing this post just to launder my own ego, or is this the equivalent of a perp coming back to the scene of the crime? Was I ambitious (laudatory) or ambitious (derogatory)? Maybe you can tell me. But I hope either way it makes for a fun story.

From Jakub Krehel, a new blog post about self constraint in the era when AI makes it easy to ignore constraints altogether.

My caveat is that the post doesn’t fully come together for me – jumping from AI to animations and then back to AI the way the author did does not feel cohesive.

At the same time, in the middle of the post, there are some nice examples of animating juxtaposed with overanimating that caught my attention. We talked about sugar and juice before, and this adds to that conversation. Here’s one example:

Not all animations need to be wholly meaningful and functional – just like not all graphic design, iconography, and typography have to be – but part of growth as a designer is knowing how to limit your budget of “superfluous” stuff even if no one else tells you to, and then how to spend that budget really, really well.

Perhaps ironically given the subject matter, I found this 34-minute video by Razbuten a bit intense, but I would still recommend it to people who work on onboarding, settings, etc.:

In the video, the author tries to answer the question: how to make any given game a challenge, given there is no universal standard of difficulty and every player arrives at a game not just with different skillset, but also likely different goals.

There are many techniques a game can use to adapt to the player – a simple upfront difficulty selector, complex difficulty settings, a training level, adaptive difficulty, accessibility/​assist modes – but there are no easy answers. Each method comes with pros and cons, and perhaps the very notion that a game should adapt to the user is flawed; some players might find it more rewarding to have to step up to the game instead.

In the video, Razbuten covers a lot of examples really well. I’m not going to say any of this maps 1:1 to productivity software as goals of games are very different than goals of apps… but even though I have never played any of the games mentioned, the examples made me think. After all, some of the psychology of mastery will be the same between these two realms. (I bet there were at least some of you who saw the previous post about LaTeX and thought “this looks hard and fascinating – I’m going in,” and others took a note to never approach it.)

I like Angela Collier’s videos about physics and I was delighted to discover this 18-minute one…

…because it’s a great continuation to the thread about the complexity of Microsoft Office I shared recently.

Collier talks about why physicists prefer LaTeX to Word. LaTeX is sort of a nerdy HTML that predates HTML. It looks like this…

…and given how nerdy HTML already is, you might imagine this is a power-user tool that’s chiefly about power and control. But Collier makes the argument that there are some things that LaTeX makes much easier:

• there is absolutely no need (or peer pressure) to spend time styling the document by choosing fonts, colors, etc.,
• there is no “live preview,” and making a PDF is a separate step similar to compilation in coding – which means it doesn’t constantly occupy your mind,
• GUIs can slow you down because the keyboard is faster than the mouse,
• LaTeX doesn’t give you a lot of control over positioning, which is better than giving you only a semblance of control over positioning (this is the TikTok meme Collier alluded to briefly).

This is really interesting because it goes right to the core of the uncomfortable truth: naïve design decisions meant to make things easier might achieve the opposite. I shared the ForkLift example where the team didn’t understand what made the previous version great, and more recently the animation that could slow people down.

(Of course, there is also the issue of typographical craft of LaTeX documents set in Computer Modern, but let’s save this for another time.)

Also, the video starts with Collier apologizing for potentially making the audience feel dumb in a prior video. I don’t think it’s a joke, and I found it thoughtful and refreshing.

My arch nemesis lives only about 1.5 blocks away from me. It’s a coffee shop door. More specifically, it’s a sign on that door:

This is what happens with embarrassing regularity: I am inside, about to step out, my brain reads PUSH from the other side – and so of course, like an idiot, I push the door instead of pulling it.

Sure, bad design. But don’t worry, I am not going full Don Norman on you. I wanted to show you this other thing, in Pixelmator Pro:

A pretty non-threatening menu, it seems, but sometimes when I see a treatment like this, my brain actually sees this…

…and it takes just a bit of extra thinking to figure out where I am and where I’m going.

This is one of the recurring boolean problems in UX design. Given a choice, do we show the noun/​adjective of the present, or the verb of the future? Because another way would be to show the current state:

To me, this is unambiguous; the state is easy to understand visually without thinking, and the implied flip action also feels pretty natural. You could go even further:

Without knowing much of the context here, this would be my recommendation. Of course, this last configuration not only implies toggling but also implies showing, but that’s probably okay given all the context surrounding it?

Now, like with many things I talk about here, I don’t have the benefit of user testing or research. (In practice, though, they aren’t often available for small things like this, anyway.)

Also, this isn’t a universal recommendation. This is an evergreen UX problem for a reason. If there were other commands around it, the showing/​hiding verbs might have to appear. Same if no option had a checkmark by default. (One or two checkmarks establish an implied “show/​hide” verb for the whole section, but without any, it might feel like an unusual menu filled with only nouns.)

There are more conventions – “Turn X On,” showing both options, submenus – each one with pros and cons. It’s good to be aware of all, because even if your tool uses one consistently, users might bring a different one as a default way of processing things. But the worst part about the Pixelmator menu is that it’s mixing conventions:

This screenshot, like the first one at the top, is real. It’s hard for me to understand the rationale here, and it makes processing this menu even harder. Maybe I need to go to a certain neighbourhood coffee shop to get more coffee…