I find this to be the defining difference between the “devices” (the phone, the tablet, the watch, etc.) and a computer: the computer is a blank slate, it is what you want it to be.

I miss the little light that used to indicate the Mac was sleeping.

The network behaves like a gobbling No-Face because the network is designed to behave as such. All of the new popular social media platforms offer more of the same. What’s the point?

I’m always amazed by how much and how well the average person knows Excel — the extent they’re willing to suffer to bend the tool to their will. So many companies run on spreadsheets cobbled together in a fashion not dissimilar to vibe coding.

Will apps as prepackaged products lose importance over what they enable — the skills or data sources they add? The AI chat interface is proliferating across apps, but it seems more likely we will be bringing our own favourite assistant to them, pulling and accessing specific capabilities.

John Kennedy: “When an article says “some scientists think” then remember this: I, a scientist, once thought I could fit a whole orange in my mouth. I could, it turns out, get it in there, but I hadn’t given sufficient thought to the reverse operation.”

I really like this framing by Jason Fried, on how to balance features. From just thinking about high/medium/low priority to “What should be obvious?”. Not everything can be obvious, making something obvious often means causing something else to be less obvious.

Got around to adding search to this blog. It’s powered by Pagefind, which I’ve been meaning to try. It was super simple to set up and use out of the box.

Heliographe: “If you put the Apple icons in reverse it looks like the portfolio of someone getting really really good at icon design.”

Again on the topic of icons, another article worth a read — with comparisons and examples from the original Macintosh HIG (Human Interface Guidelines) dating back to 1992.

Frank Chimero in an exhortation to treat AI as an instrument, with a focus on practice.

Sean Goedecke: “Much of the complexity is produced by a small set of what I call wicked features, which interfere with every other feature. For instance, adding a whole new user type: once you do that, you have to ask can this user type access this feature for every feature for the rest of the company’s life.”

Jim Nielsen laments how Tahoe has introduced icons in menus everywhere.

For a time, I used iWeb for my personal website before switching over to RapidWeaver. I remember both with fondness. There was a time when we believed everyone would build a personal website, and we made consumer software to help them do it. iWeb was discontinued in 2011, but that didn’t stop Corbin Davenport from […]

Accounts, notifications, feature announcements, forced updates — a solid catalogue of modern app annoyances.

David Galbraith: AI buttons are different from, say Photoshop menu commands in that they can just be a description of the desired outcome rather than a sequence of steps (incidentally why I think a lot of agents’ complexity disappears). For example Photoshop used to require a complex sequence of tasks (drawing around elements with a […]

Nowfal Khadar, expanding on the Jevons paradox (production efficiency leading to higher demand), which is frequently mentioned when discussing AI and employment: Once demand saturates, employment doesn’t further increase but holds steady at peak demand. But as automation continues and workers keep getting more productive, employment starts to decline. In textiles, mechanization enabled massive output […]