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Marcin Wichary brings attention to this lovely dialog in ClarisWorks from 1997: He quips: this breaks the rule of button copy being fully comprehensible without having to read the surrounding strings first, perhaps most well-known as the “avoid «click here»” rule. Never Register/​Register Later/​Register Now would solve that problem, but wouldn’t look so neat. This got me thinking about how you judge when an interface should bend to fit systematic rules vs. exert itself and its peculiarities and...

Jason Gorman writes about the word “continuous” and its place in making software. We think of making software in stages (and we often assign roles to ourselves and other people based on these stages): the design phase, the coding phase, the testing phase, the integration phase, the release phase, and so on. However this approach to building and distributing software isn’t necessarily well-suited to an age where everything moves at breakneck speed and changes constantly. The moment we start writi...

Steve Krouse wrote a piece that has me nodding along: Programming, like writing, is an activity, where one iteratively sharpens what they're doing as they do it. (You wouldn't believe how many drafts I've written of this essay.) There’s an incredible amount of learning and improvement, i.e. sharpening , to be had through the process of iteratively building something. As you bring each aspect of a feature into reality, it consistently confronts you with questions like, “But how will t...

I shipped some updates to my notes site . Nothing huge. Just small stuff. But what is big stuff except a bunch of small stuff combined? So small stuff is important too. What follows is a bunch of tiny details you probably don’t care about, but they were all decisions I had to make and account for along the way to shipping. For me, the small details are the fun part! Each Post Now Has Its Own URL The site used to consist of a single, giant HTML page with every note ever. For feeds and linking pur...

Dave Rupert puts words to the feeling in the air: the unspoken promise of AI is that you can automate away all the tasks and people who stand in your way. Sometimes I feel like there’s a palpable tension in the air as if we’re waiting to see whether AI will replace designers or engineers first. Designers empowered by AI might feel those pesky nay-saying, opinionated engineers aren’t needed anymore. Engineers empowered with AI might feel like AI creates designs that are good enough for most situa...

Imagine I’m the design leader at your org and I present the following guidelines I want us to adopt as a team for doing design work: Typography: Use expressive, purposeful fonts and avoid default stacks (Inter, Roboto, Arial, system). Motion: Use a few meaningful animations (page-load, staggered reveals) instead of generic micro-motions. Background: Don't rely on flat, single-color backgrounds; use gradients, shapes, or subtle patterns to build atmosphere. Overall: Avoid boilerplate layouts ...

Greg Knauss has my attention with a food analogy in his article “Lose Myself” : A Ding Dong from a factory is not the same thing as a gâteau au chocolat et crème chantilly from a baker which is not the same thing as cramming chunks of chocolate and scoops of whipped cream directly into your mouth [...] The level of care, of personalization, of intimacy — both given and taken — changes its nature. I love food and analogies, so let’s continue down that path. Take these three items for example: A M...

I like pie. And I’ve learned that if I want a pie done right, I gotta do it myself. Somewhere along my pilgrimage to pie perfection, I began taking a photo of each bake — pic or it didn’t happen. Despite all my rhetoric for “owning your own content”, I’ve hypocritically used Instagram to do the deed. Which has inexorably lead me to this moment: I want an archive of all the pie pics I’ve snapped. So I took the time to build and publish my best subdomain yet: pies.jim-nielsen.com How It Works Prog...

The other day I was looking at the team billing section of an AI product. They had a widget labeled “Usage leaderboard”. For whatever reason, that phrase at that moment made me pause and reflect — and led me here to this post. It’s an interesting label. You could argue the widget doesn’t even need a label. You can look at it and understood at a glance: “This is a list of people sorted by their AI usage, greatest to least.” But it has that label. It could have a different label. Imagine, for a mo...

For my future self, these are a few of my notes from this book . A take from one historian on the Luddite movement: If workmen disliked certain machines, it was because of the use that they were being put, not because they were machines or because they were new Can’t help but think of AI. I don’t worry about AI becoming AGI and subjugating humanity. I worry that it’s put to use consolidating power and wealth into the hands of a few at the expense of many. The Luddites smashed things: to destroy,...

Dave Rupert articulated something in “Priority of idle hands” that’s been growing in my subconscious for years: I had a small, intrusive realization the other day that computers and the internet are probably bad for me […] This is hard to accept because a lot of my work, hobbies, education, entertainment, news, communities, and curiosities are all on the internet. I love the internet, it’s a big part of who I am today Hard same. I love computers and the internet. Always have. I feel lucky to hav...

Over the years, I’ve used different icon sets on my blog. Right now I use Heroicons . The recommended way to use them is to copy/paste the source from the website directly into your HTML. It’s a pretty straightforward process: Go to the website Search for the icon you want Hover it Click to “Copy SVG” Go back to your IDE and paste it If you’re using React or Vue, there are also npm packages you can install so you can import the icons as components. But I’m not using either of those frameworks, s...

SITUATION: there are 14 competing AI labs. “We can’t trust any of these people with super-intelligence. We need to build it ourselves to ensure it’s done right!" “YEAH!” SOON: there are 15 competing AI labs. (See: xkcd on standards .) The irony: “we’re the responsible ones” is each lab’s founding mythology as they spin out of each other. Reply via: Email · Mastodon · Bluesky

In this new AI world, “taste” is the thing everyone claims is the new supreme skill. But I think “care” is the one I want to see in the products I buy. Can you measure care? Does scale drive out care? If a product conversation is reduced to being arbitrated exclusively by numbers, is care lost? The more I think about it, care seems antithetical to the reductive nature of quantification — “one death is a tragedy, one million is a statistic”. Care considers useful, constructive systematic forces —...

This is one of those small things that drives me nuts. Why? I don’t know. I think it has something to do with the fact that I have a computer that is faster than any computer I’ve ever used in my entire life — and yet, clicking on buttons results in slight but perceptible delays. Let me explain. Imagine a button that looks like this: < Button onClick={ async () => { const data = await getSessionUrlFromStripe (id); window . location = data. url ; } > Upgrade to Pro </ Button > For ...

I recently updated my collection of macOS icons to include Apple’s new “Creator Studio” family of icons. Doing this — in tandem with seeing funny things like this post on Mastodon — got me thinking about the history of these icons. I built a feature on my icon gallery sites that’s useful for comparing icons over time. For example, here’s Keynote : (Unfortunately, the newest Keynote isn’t part of that collection because I have them linked in my data by their App Store ID and it’s not the same ID ...

Researchers at Anthropic published their findings around how AI assistance impacts the formation of coding skills : We found that using AI assistance led to a statistically significant decrease in mastery […] Using AI sped up the task slightly, but this didn’t reach the threshold of statistical significance. Wait, what? Let me read that again: using AI assistance led to a statistically significant decrease in mastery Ouch. Honestly, the entire articles reads like those pieces you find on the int...

You’ve probably heard this famous quote from Steve Jobs about saying ‘no’: People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things. But wait, we have AI now. We don’t have to say no to 1,000 things. We can say yes to all the things ...

So I’m making a thing and I want it to be styled different if the link’s been visited. Rather than build something myself in JavaScript, I figure I’ll just hook into the browser’s mechanism for tracking if a link’s been visited (a sensible approach, if I do say so myself ). Why write JavaScript when a little CSS will do? So I craft this: .entry :has ( a :visited ) { opacity : . 5 ; filter : grayscale ( 1 ); } But it doesn’t work. :has() is relatively new, and I’ve been known to muff it, so it’s ...

Nic Chan comes out as the whistleblower on how many “Contact Us” pages are made (spoiler: they’re designed to keep us from contacting anyone). A “fuck off contact page” is what a company throws together when they actually don’t want anyone to contact them at all. They […] are trying to reduce the amount of money they spend on support by carefully hiding the real support channels […] If you solve your own problem by reading the knowledge base, then this is a win for the company. They don’t want t...