In 2018, Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie teamed up to make a short PSA about the dangers of frame rate interpolation, a.k.a. the soap opera effect:

It’s a strangely boring video from the men known for exciting filmmaking, but it captures a fascinating debate. TL; DR of their argument: Home TVs have an option to take a typical 24fps movie and create interim frames to make it feel like a 60fps production. It’s often on by default, but you should turn it off.

What’s interesting is that 60 or more fps is indeed in some ways objectively better: you see smoother movement, and you can notice more. Once you start paying attention, any whip pan or drastic movement in the cinematic 24fps appears very choppy…

…and, of course, that is completely missing the point. The argument for 24fps is that it’s simply cinema’s vernacular, right next to anamorphic lenses with their blue lens flares and vertical stretching. The movies are not about conveying information, but they are about conveying a certain feel. (And also, about tradition.)

I’m mentioning this because I spotted a similar battle happening when it comes to scrolling.

Go to any page in Vivaldi and hold a down arrow key for a while. That scrolls through the page, moving it in chunks, reacting immediately to the initial key press and then the synthesized autorepeat presses:

Firefox listens to the keys the same way, but it “upgrades” the choppiness to a 60fps movement by interpolating it:

And Safari does something different altogether – it approaches it more like a game physics engine would. It only listens to ↓ down (when it turns on the scrolling “motor”) and then ↓ up (when it turns it off):

This has an interesting effect: the movement is smoother than even Firefox’s – that’s because it doesn’t try to straighten something choppy, but it is itself smooth, by nature.

At the same time, this approach feels a bit loose, like driving an old 1960s car. It also takes away any control of speed; Safari pages always scroll at this rate, no matter your keyboard settings. (Arguably, however, control via the key repeat rate that other browsers respect is also an illusion, as it affects typing as well. Would you ever change it just to control the scroll speed?)

Of course, the analogy to frame interpolation doesn’t really make sense. Safari is not a soap opera, Firefox is not a smooth motion effect on your TV, and Vivaldi is not a cinematic experience. In contrast with movies and television, I don’t think there are any expectations or tradition here.

In this particular context, I believe Firefox and particularly Safari are better because this is about conveying information, and smoother scrolling does help your eyes and your brain connect all the little befores with all the little afters.

But I am sharing it mostly as a reminder that a keyboard is really just a button board by a different name. And sometimes it’s good to look at a key hold, and decide:

• is this a sequence of pulsating key presses,
• or is it a button being held down and then released up?

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.

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.

Turns out that the breathing light survives, sort of, not really, in an Apple product today:

The AirPods Pro case does this when charging – right at the start, or when you tap it later. But it disappears after a while, the pace is now 28 breaths a minute (over twice as fast as the original iteration), and the light is orange.

Is it still the same thing, reflecting on how smaller organisms breathe faster? Or is it mostly an unrelated idea, with the light fading in and out indicating activity rather than lack of it? My money is on the latter – the light turns white when pairing, too, and it cycles even faster then – but it was nice to imagine the return of the old feature for a second or two… or 2.1, to be precise.

This first one – in response to pressing the volume buttons – feels world-class. Subtle responses to buttons being pressed, nice haptics, good physics:

This one – stretching of the control center – made me incredulous. The performance and physics of it all are good and fluid, but this feels like absolutely the wrong thing to do here. I think it’s as designed, but it feels buggy to me. Maybe I’m oversensitive to stretching type and shapes like this, but I can’t stand how icky it feels. I am not sure I have seen another place in iOS 26 where elements would stretch in such a cheap way:

And this one – tapping on the album cover to make it show and hide – is bad in perhaps every possible way. It feels designed poorly and engineered poorly, like an HTML approximation of a real thing. All sorts of bad curves and sudden switches, slight reorientations of UI, even some flickering of interface elements at the bottom. It feels so rough I would probably just do a hard switch, no transition, until I got this right. After all, no animation is better than bad animation, and this is not responding to fingers in real time (when the user controls the “speed,” and you absolutely need a transition):

Ultimately I don’t know if this is “as designed,” or rushed, or what are the causes. But It’s interesting and a bit hard to realize that these days even animations in iOS 26 – once, I believe, a staple of good design and execution – are all over the place.

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.