Among many genuinely useful deeplinks you can use to control Raycast from afar in a simple way, I just spotted an interesting one:
raycast://confetti
This is what it does:
Despite it being a confetti cannon and nothing more, I think it goes deeper than stuff like e.g. Asana’s “celebration creatures”, and it deserves recognition for three actually kinda serious reasons:
You can use it to quickly test whether you’re wiring deeplinks correctly. It’s clever the Raycast team put it at the beginning of the doc page; I think every API or a complex connection method should have a simple and delightful “success scenario” for two reasons: to celebrate you establishing that connection, and to have something so simple it cannot itself be misbehaving (this way you know that if you can’t get confetti to work, you for sure messed up something elsewhere).
Once you know how to invoke it from far away, it’s also great for testing other things. Sounds can be muted. In JavaScript, console.log() can be too buried if you don’t have a console open or visible, and alert(“Test”) is kind of depressingly old-school and steals focus. This HUD-like thing feels like a modern way of approaching this: You know you’ll notice it when it fires away, and it will leave no lasting damage. (Okay, fair, it does steal focus too, so that’d be one thing to improve.)
It has great production value. I hate perhaps all of Google’s search easter eggs because they’re built so extremely cheaply – try searching for “do a barrel roll” or “askew” (and no, I’m not going to dignify them with links because links are my love language). It’s rare and worth celebrating when something that could very well be an internal joke or a test feature for nerds is actually something you want to use because it’s so well-made. (See also: Linear’s internal testing UI.)
Anyone using old computers for graphics remembers the strangeness of “flood fill”:
The 1950s and 1960s computers were so sluggish that their consoles with blinking lights were not just for show; the operations were slow enough that you could still follow the lights in real time.
This ceased to be true soon afterwards. The microcomputer revolution temporarily reset some computing progress, but by the 1980s and 1990s more and more things were happening too fast for us to keep up.
But here (this above is Paint in Windows 1.0, and you can try for yourself in a browser!) was one example where you could still see an algorithm working hard. It was mesmerizing and educational, and it was a rare example where perhaps you didn’t mind the computer taking its sweet time. Even messing up like I did above – maybe especially messing up – ended up fascinating to watch.
Wikipedia has examples of a few different flood fill algorithms, which are even more interesting:
But by now Minesweeper retired from sweeping mines, and today computers are so fast that it’s hard for me to imagine any flood fill being anything else but flash flood…
…except this is what I just saw in Pixelmator on my Mac:
I don’t know if this is a nod toward a classic flood fill, or just a nice unrelated transition. But I found it genuinely delightful, and it’s fast enough that I would imagine it doesn’t bother pros who need to do it often.
Sometimes it’s nice to see a computer working when there’s a good reason; some apps like banking apps even insert artificial, visible delays after crucial operations, just so that the users feel comfortable knowing their important transaction went through.
But sometimes it’s nice to see a computer working for no reason at all.
While both of these services changed a lot since the essays, they are still worth reading. They might be the closest to modern reviews of software as I can think of, and the way the essays are done also teaches us storytelling lessons – from nice visualizations and comparisons, to rich footnotes. There is also a great balance of high-level overview, and then jumping into specifics that reinforce it.
Here’s one example of cool tooling O’Beirne used to make his points more sticky:
I wrote a script that takes monthly screenshots of Google and Apple Maps. And thirteen months later, we now have a year’s worth of images:
The result is informative and mesmerizing:
Among the essays, I’d particularly recommend these:
The back-and-forth of Google Maps’s Moat and New Apple Maps: Reverse engineering areas of interest, thinking of how the slow changes in visuals lead up to strategy, good visual comparison of competition, and small fascinating anecdotes of places like Parkfield, California. (And a great example of the old adage: don’t get into the business of predicting the future as this will age your writing the most.)
The dev toolbar exists directly inside the app and allows us to easily toggle feature flags on and off. When something didn’t look right in the refreshed UI, it took us just one click to compare it with the previous version. That made it easier to determine whether the refresh had broken something or whether it had behaved that way before. Having the updates live behind feature flags also meant that instead of developing the redesign in isolation and shipping all the changes at once, we could integrate incremental changes to the platform.
I also cut it out here so it’s easier to see:
Here’s what I like about it:
It’s a separate UI surface: Rather than being awkwardly integrated alongside production UI and adding jank to it, it is a clearly delineated toolbar you know users won’t ever see, allowing the rest of the interface to always feel like production.
The feature flag toggling is easy: You don’t have to go anywhere else and possibly log in to toggle a flag, and you don’t have to wait for it to take effect. This will mean more people than just the core team members will be using it.
Toggling this particular feature flag is as easy as clicking on a tile: I don’t know if anyone can promote others flags their care about to be easily toggle’able tiles, but I can imagine this really beneficial, too.
The feature flag toggling is instantaneous without any visual jank: I understand that the best way to compare two things visually is to switch between them promptly in situ; our visual system is really good at spotting even small changes when aided this way.
Each one of the above bullet points is individually a small point of friction and easy to renege on, especially when it comes to internal-only interfaces. However, a combination of all of them results in great compounded interest, and I bet makes this interface effective – in addition to just feeling like fun to use.
Appreciate Linear sharing this internal detail; if you are using an interesting internal tool or UI that you are allowed to share, please consider it and let me know!
This 25-minute segment on MKBHD’s Waveform podcast (video or audio, segment starts at 40:21) is from November 2024, and is a nice counterpart to the post about favourite well-made apps and sites.
The original theme is “what is an app that you use all the time, and like to use, but is actually a bad app?” but it quickly moves to a more general conversation about good and bad mobile apps.
It’s always interesting to me to see what themes emerge and what other people think is important. Here’s the list where I linked to relevant apps as long as I could find them:
Bad apps:
Google Messages – dinged for unreliable spam and lack of organization/filtering
Notion (on mobile) – hard to orient yourself and some direct manipulation is wonky
many smart home accessory apps – bad and redundant with Google Home, but have to keep for emergencies
Netgear Orbi (network router) – specific functionality and bad password recovery
Hatch (white noise machine for babies) – simple things are hard to discover
Beagle Bros was a 1980s software company making apps for Apple II that is still remembered fondly for their personality.
The company had a hobbyist slant, selling various small tools and collections with fun names like Beagle Bag (in the “Indoor Sports” collection) and DOS Boss and Utility City – similar perhaps to Norton Utilities on the PC side, but with a lot more fun and charisma. This is one of their loading screens, also showing both their recognizable logo and their endearing quirkiness:
How do you understand a man who has three clocks on his wall, showing the time in three different cities-San Diego, Fresno, and Seattle-all, of course, showing the same time (″If anything changes in those cities, we’ll know about it”)?
(I find the anachronistic combination of hedcuts and dot matrix printer typography particularly fascinating.)
Some of their software was more serious; Beagle Bros released many useful tools and even text editing and presentation apps. They also made practical posters:
But other stuff…? It was just goofing off:
How does this relate to craft and quality?
There is this interesting question about how much product and marketing and vibes and lorecorrelate. Did we forgive Sierra On-Line the numerous flaws of their games because we liked the company? Do we love Panic because we like what they do, or because of how they do it? Did Google put doodles on its homepage to distract people from more nefarious things, or because it just felt like a fun way to celebrate things? Is there such a thing as pure selflessness? What is the nature of free will?
Those are, perhaps, topics for future posts.
But Beagle Bros must have been doing something right if there is still a living, elaborate catalog of their works online, 40+ years later. Jeff Atwood also argued in 2015 that it was more than just fun – or that “fun” itself can give back in great ways:
Here were a bunch of goofballs writing terrible AppleSoft BASIC code like me, but doing it for a living – and clearly having fun in the process. Apparently, the best way to create fun programs for users is to make sure you had fun writing them in the first place.
But more than that, they taught me how much more fun it was to learn by playing with an interactive, dynamic program instead of passively reading about concepts in a book. […]
One of the programs on these Beagle Bros floppies, and I can’t for the life of me remember which one, or in what context this happened, printed the following on the screen: “One day, all books will be interactive and animated.”
I thought, wow. That’s it. That’s what these floppies were trying to be! Interactive, animated textbooks that taught you about programming and the Apple II! Incredible.
Steven Frank, the co-founder of Panic, wrote this in 1999, with similar themes:
You never knew exactly what you were going to get. I remember one program listing printed on the side of a bird that, when run, produced a series of wild chirping noises from the Apple’s speaker. And this was from a program that was only five to ten lines long. As a neophyte BASIC programmer myself, I was stunned and amazed. How could you make something this cool with this small amount of code? […]
Beagle Bros’ tools were fantastic. They literally let you do the (allegedly) impossible, like change the names of operating system commands. And they always packed the disks full with extra stuff. Demos of their other products, and strange graphics hacks that existed for no reason other than the fact that they were cool, and because there was spare room on the disk. Beagle Bros. had a lot to do with why I ever wanted to learn programming in the first place. […]
I’ll never forget the book. […] The book was a huge compilation of all around interesting stuff. Weird Apple II tricks that were pointless, but endlessly fascinating. Like the fact that there were extra offscreen pixels of lo-res graphics memory that you could write to, that never got displayed. Or how to put “impossible” inverted or flashing characters into your disk directory listing. Or how to modify system error messages. Not very useful, but really fun to know and really, really cool to mess with. My dad was convinced I was going to somehow break the computer with all this hacking, but a simple reboot always fixed everything.
(I swear I did think of Panic above as a spiritual successor to Beagle Bros without knowing that their work literally inspired one of the Panic’s founders!)
The subtlety: They had utilities which would produced formatted Basic listings and they would give example output of these utlities in their ads and catalogs. It was quite a while before I realized that most of those examples were not program excerpts, but complete programs which of course contained the Beagle Bros signature weirdness. And then there were the seemingly innocent hex dumps. My favorite was from the cover of one of their catalogs, which had a classic picture of this fellow sitting in a chair. On the floor next to him is a handbag with a piece of tractor paper sticking out. On the paper is a hex dump: 48 45 4C 50 21 20 and so on, which are ASCII codes that spell out the message: “HELP! GET ME OUT! I’M TRAPPED IN HERE!----SOPHIE”
After the work the company had done on AppleWorks 3.0, Simonsen felt ready to jump into the Macintosh market with a “Mac AppleWorks” of their own – they called it Beagle Works. Unfortunately, other companies – giants in the Mac market such as Microsoft, Claris, and Symantec – had the same idea. Their resources were far greater than Beagle Bros had imagined, and the race was costly.
The gamble killed the company. It’s likely that the changing software market would anyway.
But the years before seem to still inspire some people. Check out the Beagle Bros Repository – the homepage is a bit confusing (I think it prominently shows last-updated or last-added things for some reason?), but just use the nav at the top. Maybe it will inspire you, too.
This is incredible – a story of a museum exhibit that replicated an experience of being a tech support person for a videogame company some time in the early 1990s:
You knew hint lines existed, right? 1-900 numbers, long-distance charges, hoping whoever answers actually knows what they’re talking about. They had incomplete documentation, contradictory notes, whatever the previous shift scribbled down. Nintendo’s Power Line is probably the most famous example. There’s a few great videos floating around about them.
The team invented a few new games (“We weren’t just making a game about hint lines. We were making the games that would’ve required hint lines to exist in the first place”), a few personas, and put together a 300-page realistic binder:
The entire story is so worth a read.
Looking back, we think ACMI said yes because we pitched infrastructure, not nostalgia. If you’re old enough, you probably remember that hint lines existed. We wanted people to experience what it was like to be part of that system.
[…]
Next time you tab over to a wiki page or watch a YouTube guide, spare a thought for hint line counselors of the early 1990s, armed with incomplete documentation, good intentions, and hope that the person on the other end was asking about a game they’d actually played. They were unsung heroes of gaming’s most chaotic era, and now, for a few minutes at least, you can experience their particular brand of helpful desperation firsthand.
The exhibit is still available at ACMI in Melbourne until March this year, “along with a life-size usable corporate cubicle (with a dead plant!) and matching hardware straight from the ’90s.”
You can also play it online, although the team warns: “Online is not the intended experience. Flipping through the physical artifact is half the fun.”
It serves as a bit of design history and even critique of early Mario games, and then in the middle it turns into an analysis of the Mario port on Game & Watch – an obsolete technology even in the 1980s, and something that could have been an easy cash grab, except someone cared.
Translating Mario’s mechanics to a much inferior tech is an interesting design challenge, plus there’s just this universal pleasure of seeing someone go extra. And the video has a nice ending message, too.
This is neither the first nor the last time I’m sharing David Jonathan Ross’s work; today I want to link to a really fun glyph explorer he put together recently:
That’s it. That’s the tweet. On this blog I generally want to capture the meaning of well-made things, deeper thinking, going beyond cheap sugary delight, the discomfort of rigor meeting joy and craft colliding with function, and the “why” of it all – and a lot of that is actually all here, too, as long as you keep clicking on things.
But: sometimes it’s also just so nice simply to look at beautiful letterforms for a while.
What are you favourite well-made apps or sites? Phones and computers alike.
Doesn’t have to be “pretty,” but well-made according to whatever definition works for you.
I specifically made it kind of vague, and these are the answers I got. I grouped them into categories and added links. I am excited to dig into these and study them, but wanted to share a raw list as well in case this inspires some of you, too.
Thank you to everyone who participated! (Numbers in circles like ② or ③ mean more than one person nominated a given site or app.)
Info sites:
Ian’s Shoelace Site ② “A «does one thing well» site. Great breadth and depth. Information architecture designed to help you discover/find information, not sell you something. Loads fast. Still maintained after decades.”
SCELBI Computer Museum. “Useful, tightly curated, organized, loads fast, no BS. A basic bootstrap thing, but there’s something magical about it. Small enough to be digestible in an hour, well set up for either research or just cool vibes . Partly bc subject itself is «small» but seems not only that.”
“I’m in love with Maggie Appleton’s site. The general design and the illustrations, the content (from quick notes to polished essays), the way it creates a visual and conceptual taxonomy with the #digitalgarden concept.”
Mimestream ③ “It basically stays out of my way? Which is about as good as it gets these days. Also, it has just enough customization options to handle my sometimes complex number of gmail accounts (personal/work, for various clients, etc.)”
Things ② “The fanciest, most attention-to-detail software I know of.”
Sup “Pretty niche. I’m thinking specialist interfaces for specialists here. Tools that become an extension of their users’ bodies and disappear in te use”
McMaster-Carr ④ “The best online catalog.” “Impossibly fast. Still in awe after all these years.” “It supports your cognition, including with contextual material, to find the thing you are looking for (or the thing you didn’t know you were looking for until you started looking). It helps you find the right part because of what they show, the right filters, and especially the contextual information (I think about the little scale they had to explain the different hardnesses of rubber, for example).”
Cars&Bids. “Fast, functional, and easy to use. Not stunning, just utilitarian.”
iA Writer ② “Simple and effective, using it I always wish to write more but I forget it again.” “Has been consistently great for years.”
“I’ve been using Bear ② by Shinyfrog for my notes for well over a decade now. Dependable, works great, no junk ware, and a reasonable price. Pretty to boot. The fact that in the 10+ years I’ve been using it, there’s only been a single major overhaul update is a feature, not a bug to me.”
“Notability! Haven’t found anything else that matches the flexibility for handling imported files & photographs, typed notes, hand-drawn diagrams and mark-ups completely seamlessly within a single document. Unbeatable for handling both notes in class (uni) and on site (trade).”
“Been using OmniOutliner daily for decades. Simple, focussed and matches the way I think. Lots of ways to make lists and outlines but this one works for me.”
“The radio station WFMU streams online, and also has a website where you can log in to chat with other listeners and interact with the playlist. The degree to which it does what you want it to do is stunning. It doesn’t get in your way or make you learn a new paradigm; it just makes it easy to do what you want to do. It’s a lesson in design for any UI/UX people.”
Ishkur’s Guide To Electronic Music. “This website maps out all the sub-sub-sub-genres of electronic music, with descriptions and samples. I think that the fine-grained classifications are comical, but they do an excellent job of what they’re doing.”
“Easy Metronome is a simple elegant loud phone metronome that is super easy to use even for weird time signatures.”
“Pro Metronome is also excellent. I’ve used it for over 10 years and it stubbornly refuses to abandon its skeuomorphic leather and big clicky scroll wheel”
“I really appreciate the Apple Music Classical app (even though it exists in this odd liminal space beside Apple Music) having spent many years frustrated about how traditional music streaming services handle classical recordings.”
“I‘m travelling with Deutsche Bahn quite frequently, and while their own App (DB-Navigator) is quite good compared internationally, I prefer to track trains on Bahn Experte for its bare, technical and valid information and performance.”
“The Man in Seat 61 is a goldmine for train travellers. At least in Europe, the information is really up to date and if you want to find pictures of the sleeper cars of the Romanian railway or the seat map of Prague - Berlin trains, it’s all there.”
“The kiosks in Costco’s food court aren’t the prettiest to look at but they are S tier for responsiveness. You literally just press a button and immediately the item is added to your cart. You can order a hot dog and soda in under 5 seconds.”
“WebWormhole for functionality, encrypted data transfer between your devices or to your friends without installing anything. (There’s also a similar magic wormhole CLI tool.)”
PairDrop. “Drop-dead easy file sharing on the local network.”
“LocalSend is well made, because until sofar it aleay works, even when AirDrop doesn’t. And it also works on non-Apple environments.”
Other nerdy tools:
RegExr. “A web-based tool to create or explain regular expressions.”
“The Sway compositor. A keyboard-driven tiling window manager with dynamic tiling layout. I can’t even imagine trying to use a computer with floating, overlapping windows anymore; everything lines up perfectly and adjusting layout is a matter of a few extremely quick keyboard shortcuts. They take a concept—laying out multiple windows on a display without gaps or overlaps—and build a fast, coherent interface around that concept, and it works fantastically.”
“The original HP 42S calculator packed a lot of power into a convenient and ergonomic enclosure, and Free42 is a very tasteful recreation and expansion of that device for modern platforms.”
“The Kanji Study dictionary on Android has a wild amount of polish, I’m consistently impressed by how much effort has been put into it, especially because it’s sold for a (admittedly high) one-time fee.”
