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

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.

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.

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

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

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 […]

A deep dive on the micro-interactions that made Honk (a defunct messaging app) stand out. Interesting to see so much experimentation on UIs that pretty much everyone else does the same way.

Stuart Frisby: Both Sketch & Figma have support for using component libraries, but the experience of using them feels far less central to the design process than they need to be. Finding and using a component in a library is how I think 90% of design work should begin. Right now, the discoverability of components, […]

This sounds like a saner way to handle privacy settings than having a banner on every single website (security UI doesn’t work).

A reminder that the best emails are plain text and nothing else. Not only they read well on any screen (even on a watch), they actually perform better: The plain email—which took no time to design or code—was opened by more recipients and had 3.3x more clicks than the designed email. The plain, unstyled emails […]

Some insights on voice interfaces from Ian Bicking: Voice interfaces are voice interfaces. They are a way for the user to express their desire, using patterns that might be skeuomorphism of regular voice interactions, or might be specific learned behaviors. It’s not a conversation. You aren’t talking with the computer. I’ve been speaking with Alexa […]

Sean Martell, designer at Mozilla, goes through some of the FireFox related projects he got to work on at Mozilla over the last 14 years.

AIGA: Watching a single place evolve over time reveals small histories and granular inconsistencies. Train stations and airports are built, a gunpowder factory disappears for the length of the Cold War. But on certain maps, in Switzerland’s more remote regions, there is also, curiously, a spider, a man’s face, a naked woman, a hiker, a […]

I kind of hate messaging these days. Over the years different software have imposed on their users FOMO inducing features that lead us to this ridiculous reality in which we all collectively agreed that a response to a text needs to be returned within minutes, no matter the content nor the urgency. I sometimes choose […]

A web typography learning game

Johnson Banks: “If it’s ‘out there’, don’t we own it?” Well, it depends. To claim a ‘level of distinctiveness’, it’s usually down to time, and the rule of thumb is seven years. Use a logo for that amount of time, consistently, that people can see and recognise and you begin to establish some ownership of […]