I had no idea it was Alan Kay himself who was responsible for the mouse pointer’s distinctive shape. In 2020, James Hill-Khurana emailed him and got this answer:

The Parc mouse cursor appearance was done (actually by me) because in a 16x16 grid of one-bit pixels (what the Alto at Parc used for a cursor) this gives you a nice arrowhead if you have one side of the arrow vertical and the other angled (along with other things there, I designed and made many of the initial bitmap fonts).

Then it stuck, as so many things in computing do.

And boy, did it stick.

But let’s rewind slightly. The first mouse pointer during the Doug Engelbart’s 1968 Mother Of All Demos was an arrow faced straight up, which was the obvious symmetrical choice:

(You can see two of them, because Engelbart didn’t just invent a mouse – he also thought of a few steps after that, including multiple people collaborating via mice.)

But Kay’s argument was that on a pixelated screen, it’s impossible to do this shape justice, as both slopes of the arrow will be jagged and imprecise. (A second unvoiced argument is that the tip of the arrow needs to be a sharp solitary pixel, but that makes it hard to design a matching tail of the cursor since it limits your options to 1 or 3 or 5 pixels, and the number you want is probably 2.)

Kay’s solution was straightening the left edge rather than the tail, and that shape landed in Xerox Alto in the 1970s:

Interestingly enough, the top facing cursor returned as one of the variants in Xerox Star, the 1981 commercialized version of Alto…

…but Star failed, and Apple’s Lisa in 1983 and Mac in 1984 followed in Alto’s footsteps instead. Then, 1985’s Windows 1.0 grabbed a similar shape – only with inverted colors – and the cursor has looked the same ever since.

That’s not to say there weren’t innovations since (mouse trails useful on slow LCD displays of the 1990s, shake to locate that Apple added in 2015), or the more recent battles with the hand mouse pointer popularized by the web.

But the only substantial attempt at redesigning the mouse pointer that I am aware of came from Apple in 2020, during the introduction of trackpad and mousing to the iPad. The mouse pointer a) was now a circle, b) morphed into other shapes, and c) occasionally morphed into the hovered objects themselves, too:

The 40-minute deep dive video is, today, a fascinating artifact. On one hand, it’s genuinely exciting to see someone take a stab at something that’s been around forever. Evolving some of the physics first tried in Apple TV’s interface feels smart, and the new inertia and magnetism mechanics are fun to think about.

But the high production value and Apple’s detached style robs the video of some authenticity. This is “Capital D Design” and one always has to remain slightly suspicious of highly polished design videos and the inherent propensity for bullshit that comes with the territory. Strip away the budget and the arguments don’t fully coalesce (why would the same principles that made text pointer snap vertically not extend to its horizontal movement?), and one has to wonder about things left unsaid (wouldn’t the pointer transitions be distracting and slow people down?).

Yet, I am speaking with the immense benefit of hindsight. Actually using that edition of the mouse pointer on my iPad didn’t feel like the revolution suggested, and barely even like an evolution. (Seeing Apple TV’s tilting buttons for the first time was a lot more enthralling.) And, Apple ended up undoing a bunch of the changes five years later anyway. The pointer went back to a familiar Alan Kay-esque shape…

…and lost its most advanced morphing abilities:

Watching the 2025 WWDC video mentioning the change (the relevant parts start at 8:40) is another interesting exercise:

2020:

We looked at just bringing the traditional arrow pointer over from the Mac, but that didn’t feel quite right on iPadOS. […] There’s an inconsistency between the precision of the pointer and the precision required by the app. So, while people generally think about the pointer in terms of giving you increased precision compared to touch, in this case, it’s helpful to actually reduce the precision of the pointer to match the user interface.

2025:

Everything on iPad was designed for touch. So the original pointer was circular in shape, to best approximate your finger in both size and accuracy. But under the hood, the pointer is actually capable of being much more precise than your finger. So in iPadOS 26, the pointer is getting a new shape, unlocking its true potential. The new pointer somehow feels more precise and responsive because it always tracks your input directly 1 to 1.

(That “somehow” in the second video is an interesting slip up.)

I hope this doesn’t come across as making fun of the presenters, or even of the to-me-overdesigned 2020 approach. We try things, sometimes they don’t work, and we go back to what worked before.

I just wish Apple opened itself up a bit more; there are limits to the “we’ve always been at war with Eastasia” PR approach they practice in these moments, and I would genuinely be curious what happened here: Did people hate the circular pointer? Was it hard to adopt by app developers? Was it just a random casualty of Liquid Glass’s visual style, or perhaps the person who was the biggest proponent of it simply left Apple? We could all learn from this.

But the most interesting part to me is the resilience of the slanted mouse pointer shape. In a post-retina world, one could imagine a sharp edge at any angle, and yet we’re stuck with Kay’s original sketch – refined to be sure, but still sporting its slightly uncomfortable asymmetry.

The always-excellent Posy covered this in the first 7 minutes of his YouTube video:

But specifically one comment under that video caught my attention:

Honestly, I’ve never thought of the mouse cursor as an arrow, but rather its own shape. My mind was blown when I realized that it was just an arrow the whole time.

…because maybe this is actually the answer. Maybe the mouse pointer went on the same journey floppy disk icon did, and transcended its origins. It’s not an arrow shape anymore. It’s the mouse pointer shape, and it forever will be.

There are fun things you can do in software when it is aware of the dimensions and features of its hardware.

iPhone does a cute Siri animation that emanates precisely from the side button:

A bunch of Android phones visualize the charge flowing to the phone from the USB port…

…and even the whole concept of iPhone’s Dynamic Island is software cleverly camouflaging missing pixels as a background of a carefully designed, ever morphing pill.

But this idea has value beyond fun visuals. iPhone telling you where exactly to tap twice for confirming payment helps you do that without fumbling with your phone to locate the side button:

Same with the iPad pointing to the otherwise invisible camera when it cannot see you:

Even the maligned Touch Bar also did something similar for its fingerprint reader:

The rule here would be, perhaps, a version of “show, don’t tell.” We could call it “point to, don’t describe.” (Describing what to do means cognitive effort to read the words and understand them. An arrow pointing to something should be easier to process.)

You could even argue the cute MagSafe animation is not entirely superfluous, as over time it helps you internalize the position of the otherwise invisible magnets on the other side of your phone:

In a similar way, as it moved away from the home button, iPhone X introduced light bars at two edges of the screen – one very aware of the notch – as swiping affordances:

And under-the-screen fingerprint readers basically need a software/​hardware collab to function:

One of my favourite versions of this kind of integration is from much earlier, where various computers helped you map the “soft” function keys to their actual functions, which varied per app…

…and the famous Model M keyboard moving its keys to the top row helped PC software do stuff like this more easily:

(And now I’m going to ruin this magical moment by telling you the cheap ATM machine that you hate does the same thing.)

The last example I can think of (but please send me your nominations!) is the much more sophisticated and subtle way Apple’s device simulator incorporates awareness of the screen’s physical size and awareness of the dimensions of the simulated device. Here’s me using the iPhone Simulator on my 27″ Apple display. If I choose the Physical Size zoom option, it matches the dimensions of my phone precisely. The way I know this is not an accident is that it remains perfectly sized if I change the density of the whole UI in the settings.

Why am I thinking about it all this week?

The new MacBook Neo was released with two USB-C ports. Only one of the ports is USB 3, suitable for connecting a display, an SSD, and so on. The other port’s speeds are lower, appropriate only for low-throughput devices like keyboards and mice.

To Apple’s credit, macOS helps you understand the limitations – since the ports look the same and the USB-C cables are a hot mess, I think it is correct and welcome to try to remedy this in software. It looks like this, appearing in the upper right corner like all the other notifications:

I think this is nice! But it’s also just words. It feels a bit cheap. macOS knows exactly where the ports are, and could have thrown a little warning in the lower left corner of the screen, complete with an onscreen animation of swapping the plug to the other port – similar to what “double clicking to pay” does, so you wouldn’t have to look to the side to locate the socket first.

“Point to, don’t describe” – this feels like a perfect opportunity for it.

The breathing light – officially “Sleep Indicator Light” – debuted in the iconic iBook G3 in 1999.

It was originally placed in the hinge, but soon was moved to the other side for laptops, and eventually put in desktop computers too: Power Mac, the Cube, and the iMac.

The green LED was replaced by a white one, but “pulsating light indicates that the computer is sleeping” buried the nicest part of it – the animation was designed to mimic human breathing at 12 breaths per minute, and feel comforting and soothing:

Living through that era, it was interesting to see improvements to this small detail.

The iMac G5 gained a light sensor under the edge of the display in part so that the sleep indicator light wouldn’t be too bright in a dark room (and for older iMacs, the light would just get dimmer during the night based on the internal clock).

In later MacBooks, the light didn’t even have an opening. The aluminum was thinned and perforated so it felt like the sleep light was shining through the metal:

And, for a while, Apple promoted their own display connector that bundled data and power – but also bundled a bit of data, which allowed to do this:

Back when I had a Powermac G4 plugged into an Apple Cinema Display, I noticed something that was never advertised. When the Mac went to sleep, the pulsing sleep light came on, of course, but the sleep light on the display did too... in sync with the light on the Mac. I’ve tested that so many times, and it was always the same; in sync.

Just a little detail that wouldn’t sell anything, but just because.

Even years later, some people tried to recreate it on their own:

To do this I shifted the first gaussian curve to that its domain starts at 0 and remains positive. Since the time domain is 5 seconds total and the I:E ratio is known, it was trivial to pick the split point and therefore the mean. By manipulating sigma I was able to get the desired up-take and fall-off curves; by manipulating factor “c” I was able to control for peak intensity.

But at that point, in the first half of 2010s, the breathing light was gone, victim to the same forces that removed the battery indicator and the illuminated logo on the lid.

I know each person would find themselves elsewhere on the line from “the light was overkill to begin with” to “I wished to see what they would do after they introduced that invisible metal variant.”

I know where I would place myself.

This blog is all about celebrating functional and meaningful details, and there were practical reasons for the light to be there. This was in the era where laptops often died in their sleep – so knowing your computer was actually sleeping safe and sound was important – and the first appearance of the light after closing the lid meant that the hard drives were parked and the laptop could be moved safely.

The breathing itself, however, was purely a humanistic touch, and I miss that quirkiness of this little feature. If a save icon can survive, surely so could the breathing light.

Half of my education in URLs as user interface came from Flickr in the late 2000s. Its URLs looked like this:

flickr.com/photos/mwichary/favorites
flickr.com/photos/mwichary/sets
flickr.com/photos/mwichary/sets/72177720330077904
flickr.com/photos/mwichary/54896695834
flickr.com/photos/mwichary/54896695834/in/set-72177720330077904

This was incredible and a breath of fresh air. No redundant www. in front or awkward .php at the end. No parameters with their unpleasant ?&= syntax. No % signs partying with hex codes. When you shared these URLs with others, you didn’t have to retouch or delete anything. When Chrome’s address bar started autocompleting them, you knew exactly where you were going.

This might seem silly. The user interface of URLs? Who types in or edits URLs by hand? But keyboards are still the most efficient entry device. If a place you’re going is where you’ve already been, typing a few letters might get you there much faster than waiting for pages to load, clicking, and so on. It might get you there even faster than sifting through bookmarks. Or, if where you’re going is up in hierarchy, well-designed URL will allow you to drag to select and then backspace a few things from the end.

Flickr allowed to do all that, and all without a touch of a Shift key, too.

Any URL being easily editable required for it to be easily readable, too. Flickr’s were. The link names were so simple that seeing the menu…

…told you exactly what the URLs for each item were.

In the years since, the rich text dreams didn’t materialize. We’ve continued to see and use naked URLs everywhere. And this is where we get to one other benefit of Flickr URLs: they were short. They could be placed in an email or in Markdown. Scratch that, they could be placed in a sentence. And they would never get truncated today on Slack with that frustrating middle ellipsis (which occasionally leads to someone copying the shortened and now-malformed URL and sharing it further!).

It was a beautiful and predictable scheme. Once you knew how it worked, you could guess other URLs. If I were typing an email or authoring a blog post and I happened to have a link to your photo in Flickr, I could also easily include a link to your Flickr homepage just by editing the URL, without having to jump back to the browser to verify.

Flickr is still around and most of the URLs above will work. In 2026, I can think of a few improvements. I would get rid of /photos, since Flickr is already about photos. I would also try to add a human-readable slug at the end, because…
flickr.com/mwichary/sets/72177720330077904-alishan-forest-railway
…feels easier to recall than…
flickr.com/photos/mwichary/sets/72177720330077904

(Alternatively, I would consider getting rid of numerical ids altogether and relying on name alone. Internet Archive does it at e.g. archive.org/details/leroy-lettering-sets, but that has some serious limitations that are not hard to imagine.)

But this is the benefit of hindsight and the benefit of things I learned since. And I started learning and caring right here, with Flickr, in 2007. Back then, by default, URLs would look like this:

www.flickr.com/Photos.aspx?photo_id=54896695834&user_id=mwichary&type=gallery

Flickr’s didn’t, because someone gave a damn. The fact they did was inspiring; most of the URLs in things I created since owe something to that person. (Please let me know who that was, if you know! My grapevine says it’s Cal Henderson, but I would love a confirmation.)

Old-school computing has a term “molly guard”: it’s the little plastic safety cover you have to move out of the way before you press some button of significance.

Anecdotally, this is named after Molly, an engineer’s daughter who was invited to a datacenter and promptly pressed a big red button, as one would.

Then she did it again later the same day.

You might recognize molly guards from any aerial combat movie you ever watched:

And some vestigial forms of molly guards exist everywhere in civilian hardware, too: from recessed buttons, through plastic ridges around keys, to something like a SIM card ejection hole.

Of course, molly guards happen in software, too: from the cheapest “are you sure?” dialogs (which sometimes move buttons around or disable keyboard activation to slow you down), through extra modifier keys (in Ctrl+Alt+Del, the Ctrl and Alt keys are the guards), to more elaborate interactions that introduce friction in places where it’s needed:

But it’s also worth thinking of reverse molly guards: buttons that will press themselves if you don’t do anything after a while.

I see them sometimes, and always consider them very thoughtful. This is the first example that comes to my mind:

Here’s what became a standard mobile pattern:

These feel important to remember, particularly if your computer is about to embark on a long process to do something complex – like an OS update or a long render.

There is no worse feeling than waking up, walking up to the machine that was supposed to work through the night, and seeing it did absolutely nothing, stupidly waiting for hours for a response to a question that didn’t even matter.

It’s good to think about designing and signposting those flows so people know when they can walk away with confidence, and I sometimes think a reverse molly guard could serve an important purpose: in a well-designed flow, once you see it, you know things will now proceed to completion.

Everybody who routinely takes screenshots on a Mac knows very well the motor memory heaven and hell that are the screenshotting shortcuts: ⌘⇧3 to grab the whole screen, ⌘⇧4 to grab part of it, hold ⌃ ahead of time to put the result in the clipboard, press space at the right moment to select a window, hold ⌥ at a different time to remove a shadow, and so on. (Yes, there’s more.)

It’s strange to talk about those shortcuts, because the world is divided into two groups: people who have never used any of these because they are the scariest shortcuts that induce RSI if you just think about them, and people who have used them for so long that their fingers do all the work. Either group would struggle with writing the above paragraph – as did I, needing to watch my hands first, and then take notes.

But: why do the shortcuts start with 3? After all, ⌘⇧1 and ⌘⇧2 don’t seem to do anything.

That wasn’t always the case. Turns out that once upon a time Apple was trying to create a larger universe of nerdy shortcuts for your Mac. The effort is so old – they were introduced in 1986 – that ⌘⇧1 was added as a quick shortcut to… eject the floppy disk. And, since you could also have an external floppy drive, ⌘⇧2 was assigned to eject that, and the shortcuts for screenshots followed in sequence: ⌘⇧3 to save the screen, and ⌘⇧4 to send it straight to your printer. (Even then, there was already Caps Lock thrown into the mix, too, switching between the entire screen and the current window.)

Early BASIC programmers knew to separate their line numbers by 10 because there will always be a line you want to insert in between, but keyboard shortcut designers do not have that luxury.

And so the nice system backfired immediately. Some Macs started coming with two built-in floppy drives, but still allowed you to plug in an external one. What would you press to eject that?

Well, of course it had to be ⌘⇧0, since ⌘⇧3 was already taken.

(In an absolutely delicious bit of rhyming, the 0 key itself is on the “wrong” side of most keyboards – except Hungarian – because it was added to keyboards before the 1 key was! It felt more natural to put it after 9 than right before 2.)

Things were quiet for a while. Floppies disappeared over time. Only in 2018, Apple evolved the old Grab app that it inherited from NeXT into a Screenshot app, and assigned it a new shortcut, ⌘⇧5. That was a nice improvement – video recording, a very helpful timer, a few smaller options, and a bit of a GUI thrown atop for convenience.

There are a bunch of system and change management lessons in here, but I want to talk about something else I just learned about.

Acorn 8, a graphic app, has a delightful screenshotting feature parked under ⌘⇧7 that does something incredible: it takes a screenshot, but does so in a way where windows are separate layers, grouped by app. It’s amazing; you can re-compose stuff afterwards, reveal covered stuff, remove windows, even change the wallpaper. A mouse cursor arrives too in its own tiny layer, like a cherry on top.

I’m sharing this both because I gather people who read this blog take a lot of screenshots – but also because this is software craft. I know “delightful” is (mis—? ab—?)used to refer to beautiful but slow transitions, and cute but distracting UI copy, but this is the stuff of true delight: using newly abundant technology to actually do something useful, and rewrite the rules of something that hasn’t been touched for ages, in a way that feels magical. There is still room for improvement – notably, you cannot just fire and forget a screenshot straight into your filesystem – but I find this kind of stuff inspiring.

I also know what you’re thinking: hey, what happened to ⌘⇧6? I’m not going to tell you. It’s probably not that hard to google it, but maybe you’ll enjoy trying to guess like I did. What was a feature of Macs that arrived after 2018 that Apple would want you to forget about even more so than the floppy disks?

After James Moylan’s death in December, we were reminded again of the Moylan Arrow, the little arrow telling you which side of your car has the little fuel door:

I started wondering: what would be the conceptual equivalent of this in software? My best guess would be iOS offering to fill the one-time code from a recent SMS:

This is what it has in common with the Moylan Arrow:

• everyone benefits from it
• it happens all the time
• it solves an actual little (but not too little) frustration
• it’s there at the right place at the right time
• it is relatively low-tech (it’s not an overdesigned or an overengineered solution)
• once you know it’s there, you will love it forever

Curtosis on Mastodon unearthed the original 2019 Twitter thread from one the creator of the iOS feature, Ricky Mondello (link to XCancel), which I‘m reproducing here:

The idea for Security Code AutoFill came out of a small group of software engineers working on what we thought was a much more ambitious project. It wasn’t a PM, it wasn’t just one person, and it wasn’t what we set out to do initially.

It started as a small side idea we had while designing something very different. We jotted it down, tabled it for weeks, and then picked it up after the “more ambitious” project wasn’t panning out. It was hard, but I’m so glad we changed focus.

Even with a gem of an idea, it was still just an idea. Ideas are obviously super important — they’re necessary, but not sufficient. Here, the end result came from the idea, teamwork, and execution.

Years later, I’m still so proud of the team for making this feature happen. The team combined expertise from several areas to ship magic that worked on day 1, while asking nothing of app and website developers, without giving anyone your text messages. This still inspires me!

To every one of the folks who made this happen, I’m still in awe. Y’all are the best. <3

Addendum: FAQs
- “SMS is bad.”
↪ I know.

- “MITM.”
↪ I know.

- “FIDO is better.”
↪ It’s complicated, but acknowledged; I totally get it.

- “Android did it first.”
↪ Nah. Details matter. Privacy matters. And clipboard != AutoFill.

- *negativity*
↪ Not now. :)

I asked others on social and here are some other contenders I liked:

• The indicator that alerts you of Caps Lock when typing passwords
• Underlined letters in Windows
• Return key as an equivalent of the default action in a dialog box
• Proportionally-sized scroll bar handles
• Showing the current folder at the prompt in the terminal
• The quick link to your post after you post it
• The preview of the outside of the frame from the wide angle lens in the Camera app
• Holding space to move your cursor in iOS
• iPod automatically pausing music when you unplug the headphone jack

You can check out Mastodon and Bluesky threads for more ideas, if you are interested.

I linked to Strudel before, but this 6-minute video is even better – it shows a musician named Switch Angel constructing a trance track from scratch:

This is of course competence porn, made even better by the dry Polish lektor-like delivery. But it’s also a puzzle. I watched this so many times. There are so many great UI lessons in here:

• You can absolutely put graphics inside a textbox
• Sparklines rule
• Slider is still the best UI element in history
• Previews don’t have to feel like training wheels
• Synchronizing sounds to visuals is so powerful (see: turn signals on a car dashboard)

I found myself thinking about how you’d design something that feels real-time, but also needs to be resilient against typos, and has a distinct “commit” moment (which is what I think those yellow flashes are); some of the best moments in the video are the quick fixes that aren’t narrated.

Ultimately, this also shows how powerful and underrated plain text can be as interface. It’s a bit like designing straight in CSS, operating at the weird intersection of motor memory, creativity, and abstraction. (Is there a CSS editor that feels more like this?)

On top of all of this, the act of building the track this way is also how the finished track would sound like. Amazing stuff.

Remember all these jokes that went like this?

[God looking at a pug dog for the first time] What the hell did you humans do with my bad ass wolf I gave you?

Imagine sitting the creators of the typewriter in front of YouTube and having them watch this video.

A week ago I asked on Mastodon and Bluesky:

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.”
• Hyperion Records. “All the liner notes and song texts!”
• www.gov.uk
• plaintextsports.com

Interactive explainers:

• Bartosz Ciechanowski ③
• It’s Nicky Case!
• Neal.fun
• Making Software by Dan Hollick
• Alex Harri

Personal sites:

• “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.”
• Kottke
• Robin Sloan
• Robin Rendle
• Rasmus Andersson
• Ariel Salminen

Work and tasks:

• 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”
• CalendarBridge “<3 <3 <3”
• MyLifeOrganized
• Voice memos (iPhone)

Art/Games:

• “rekall for a simple, occasional, cyberpunk-ish retro mood board injection.”
• Good Sudoku
• Floor796
• Threes

Creative:

• Monodraw ② “for ASCII art”
• “Zerocam is the perfect no-fuzz-just-snap camera app”
• “I like Keynote. But am not completely objective about that.”
• Vectoraster “for halftones”
• Spectrolite “for colour separations”
• Darkroom
• Rayon (desktop)
• MagicaVoxel
• Fusion 360

Podcasts:

• Pocket Casts
• “Castro is still my favourite podcasting app…
• …although visually I like Queue more”

Social:

• “Telegram is the best messaging app in terms of UI design”
• “Locket is my fav «novel UX» app and its widget is always on my home screen”
• Phanpy (the Mastodon client)
• Reeder
• BarnOwl

Commerce:

• 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.”
• DigiKey

Writing and note-taking:

• 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.”
• WriterDuet

Music:

• “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.”

Travel:

• Flighty ②
• “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.”
• Transit
• Waymo’s app

Food and health:

• “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.”
• Paprika. “Love my recipe management.”
• Fitness Stats. “Simple, effective, and good looking.”
• Mela
• MacroFactor
• HealthFit
• The Way

Text editors:

• “I use Panic’s Nova an awful lot and it just has a really nice feel so I keep paying for it.”
• Sublime Text
• vim

Data transfer:

• “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.”
• Beyond Compare (Linux version)
• Alfred
• Genius Scan

I didn’t know where to put these:

• “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.”
• Sim Daltonism
• Homey

Meta:

• “I happen to maintain a list of my favourite apps. (And being well-made is sort of a pre-req.)”
• Web app directory and Mac app directory