Latest Posts (20 found)
Unsung Today

A time machine in Logic Pro

A nice moment in Logic Pro, a music app. Like with most such apps, you can press R to record you playing an instrument. However, if you forgot to play record, or were just goofing around and stumbled upon something wonderful, you can press ⇧R and the recording will appear anyway, as if you had a time machine. This is a quick TikTok video showing it in action: = 3x)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/a-time-machine-in-logic-pro/tt1-play.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> The feature is called Flashback Capture. Of course, just like with undo send , this is no magic. The app is always recording the events quietly, and then offers you to make them “real” if you want. I dug around and found a support document that offers a rare view into the mechanics of this feature, which are slightly more sophisticated than I imagined: When playback is stopped, Flashback Capture creates a separate region containing all the MIDI events received since the last playback. However, after a pause of 20 seconds between incoming MIDI events, those initial MIDI events before the pause are discarded. If when playback is stopped, you perform some MIDI events and then pause for 1.5 bars or longer, those initial notes aren’t included in the visible part of your region. If you do want those MIDI events to be included in the created region, you can drag the left region boundary to expose them. What it seems to say is: This seems like a good and thoughtful feature that prevents data loss, a sort of magical “reverse redo.” (Thank you to Chris Krycho for telling me about this feature, which is apparently also available in other music apps, e.g. Cubase and Dorico.) #above and beyond #details #errors #preview #undo If there is a longer pause within your play, the notes are still recovered, but hidden. You can always drag to reveal them, but in effect, only the most recent of your notes are immediately visible – a nice touch. (The moment you start dragging, it also shows you a quick preview of where you’re going, which is also thoughtful!) If the pause is 20 seconds or more, all the notes before that pause are no longer preserved – presumably to prevent too much wasted data in your file. However, after you stop playing, you have infinite time to invoke Flashback Capture and recover the notes.

tutorial Tutorial music Music
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Unsung Today

“A vicious circle of incompatibility”

A fun 16-minute video from PortalRunner with this premise: This is an image file, containing a picture of my cat. But if I rename it to .MP4, it becomes a video file – also of my cat. If rename to .PDF, it becomes a text document containing the script for this video. It can also be a valid webpage, a .ZIP archive, or a PowerPoint presentation, all by simply changing the name. This kind of file is sometimes called a “polyglot” (although, usually that term refers to code that works in multiple programming languages). = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/a-vicious-circle-of-incompatibility/yt1-play.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/a-vicious-circle-of-incompatibility/yt1-play.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> This kind of a file is not something that you will realistically need, but it’s a fun look into various approaches to headers and structures of file formats – something we don’t usually get to think about a lot. Buried inside the video is also an interesting digression: is the file extension just a method of delivering the file to the right application? If I rename .jpeg to .gif, and both are routed to Pixelmator, should Pixelmator do its best to detect it’s a JPEG file under the hood, or fail with a “this doesn’t look like a GIF file” message? The web has a similar challenge in the form of MIME sniffing – “MIME” is sort of the web’s equivalent of extensions, “sniffing” means detecting the file from its contents alone, ignoring everything else – and that had some security considerations, as it allowed bad actors to sneak in some malicious code under the guise of something more innocuous… basically what the video is doing for fun, but now weaponized. This is all pretty technical for this blog, but inside the Wikipedia entry for MIME sniffing is this passage that caught my attention: [MIME sniffing is still used by some browsers. However,] by making sites which do not correctly assign MIME types to content appear to work correctly in those browsers, it fails to encourage the correct labeling of material, which in turn makes content sniffing necessary for these sites to work, creating a vicious circle of incompatibility with web standards and security best practices. Decades before MIME sniffing, Jon Postel captured the essence of that line of thinking by coining Postel’s Law – “be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept” – but as enticing as it is, that has challenges similar to the above quote: A flaw can become entrenched as a de facto standard. Any implementation of the protocol is required to replicate the aberrant behavior, or it is not interoperable. […] Ensuring interoperability in this environment is often referred to as aiming to be ” bug-for-bug compatible ”. While Postel’s Law was about data flowing in and out of computer systems, the premise is to me a more evergreen design question, applicable to so many other things. Feeling “liberal in what you accept” can feel helpful, but can teach users bad habits and have bigger consequences. For any project where this applies, it’s worth asking: should we go out of our way to help the user even if they mess up, or should we be more rigid and teach them to follow the rules more strictly, as it will benefit them in the future? The Command Line Interface Guidelines I linked to before had a great example of that: You can ask if they want to run the suggested command, but don’t force it on them. For example: Rather than suggesting the corrected syntax, you might be tempted to just run it for them, as if they’d typed it right in the first place. Sometimes this is the right thing to do, but not always. Firstly, invalid input doesn’t necessarily imply a simple typo—it can often mean the user has made a logical mistake, or misused a shell variable. Assuming what they meant can be dangerous, especially if the resulting action modifies state. Secondly, be aware that if you change what the user typed, they won’t learn the correct syntax. In effect, you’re ruling that the way they typed it is valid and correct, and you’re committing to supporting that indefinitely. Be intentional in making that decision, and document both syntaxes. #encoding #errors #youtube

security Security web-development Web Development shell Shell
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Unsung Yesterday

Chrome’s breaking and entering

I got pissed at Chrome the other day . This is not the first user-hostile thing Chrome did – off the top of my head, I remember the updater fiasco from some years ago, and the more recent auto-installation of a 4GB file – but as you’ll see, this one is squarely in my wheelhouse. The transgression: Chrome took over a shortcut on my Mac – Ctrl+G – and it used it to throw me into Chrome’s version of Gemini that I have never used or was interested in using. Moreover, it decided it’s okay for Ctrl+G to put me there even if I pressed the shortcut outside of Chrome . I was never asked by Chrome if it’s okay to do so. The way I found it’s installed it was in a very unpleasant way: I tried to use Ctrl+G in my coding editor to jump to a specific line, and I got this instead: = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/chromes-breaking-and-entering/1.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/chromes-breaking-and-entering/1.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> Stuff like that can make you feel like you lost your mind. I have no idea what this window is supposed to do, where did it come from, or even – initially – why it appeared. Note that it doesn’t even identify itself as either Chrome or Gemini, unless you read the scary caveat. It feels like the UI equivalent of breaking and entering. Unsurprisingly, the pop-up doesn’t confess to stealing the shortcut, or allow you to toggle it off in any way: = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/chromes-breaking-and-entering/2.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/chromes-breaking-and-entering/2.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> It is possible to undo that behavior, but one has to connect it to Chrome first, and then go deep into its settings – first by clicking on “AI innovations,” and then by clicking on “Gemini in Chrome” – to find it: = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/chromes-breaking-and-entering/3.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/chromes-breaking-and-entering/3.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> Let’s not beat around the bush: This is effectively malware behaviour. It’s bullshit. It’s cancer. It’s deeply disrespectful toward the user. It’s prioritizing hollow metrics at the expense of everything else . But I don’t want this blog to chase news of the day or feed the outrage machine, so let me try to turn my anger into something useful. Let’s start here: There are some global keyboard shortcuts that are genuinely good. A video call mute shortcut, screenshotting, “next slide” if you’re presenting in Zoom. Everything related to computer operation – volume, brightness, media transport controls – needs to be available regardless of focus or context. (In my keyboard customization essay, I introduced my own global keyboard shortcuts , for example for scanning the next page.) But, an app installing a global keyboard shortcut without user consent is bad. This can never be anything other than opt-in. At the very least, Chrome should have shown me a clear UI that said “We’re thinking Ctrl+G would be fun for you to use. You okay with that?” and a button for me to press to confirm. (Note: Ctrl+G is the shortcut for Macs. As far as I can tell, on Windows it is Alt+G.) From people’s reactions, it seems this shortcut is auto-enabled for a subset of users: perhaps people who used Gemini before, or people on a plan that happens to include it. No matter how specific or small that group is, or how useful they might find the Ctrl+G pop-up, the issue remains: I have never consented to the app doing this. I also partly blame macOS for ceding its responsibilities here. Mac’s keyboard customization features are a mess, and Mac doesn’t have a modern command repository. It’s not just that apps can register global shortcuts as they want, without the user knowing. It’s also that there is no shared inventory of them; if an app “swallows” a shortcut but does nothing noticeable with it, it can be really hard to figure out why a shortcut seemingly just stops working. (Other apps that I remember having problems with “stealing” global shortcuts, and apps that a few readers posted are: 1Password, Notion, and Perplexity. I’d be curious if you have other examples!) In light of macOS’s deficiencies, as an app, if you offer any shortcut customization – especially if you allow global shortcuts – I think it’s important to have a page that lists all of them shortcuts in one place. This is not what Chrome does, as various shortcut options are hidden on various pages in settings. Even Zoom, which is not generally known for having a great user interface, does better here: = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/chromes-breaking-and-entering/4.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/chromes-breaking-and-entering/4.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> And, since we’re back to Chrome, what a fall from grace! When Chrome started in the late 2000s, it felt like a browser that had user’s interest in mind, and protected people from ill-behaving websites. Today, it’s the operating system that needs to protect us from Chrome. (Also, don’t call a tab “AI innovations.” It’s tacky as hell. The market gets to decide what’s innovative and what is not.) #attention #google #keyboard #mac os

web-development Web Development security Security
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Unsung Yesterday

“Creativity is fundamentally not an efficiency problem.”

A computer science professor Paul Cantrell, on Mastodon : Creative work keeps taking roughly the same amount of human labor / attention / care, even as new technologies accelerate or remove things that used to take time. This is because creativity is fundamentally not an efficiency problem; process is not just the means of producing output, but rather a labor vessel that holds the near-invisible work that is truly important. One can feel the care that goes into creative work without being aware of that work, or even being aware that work of that type exists at all. This feeling is approximate, loose, vague, but cumulative and eventually all-important; work with no care behind it wears thin and tends to fade as people live with it over time. This really resonated with me. Elsewhere, Ginger Bill, in a recent – meandering, but thought-provoking – essay titled “Good tools are invisible” : I constantly see some people praise it not for what actually makes it good, but by taking the things it’s bad at and turning them into a puzzle to have “fun” solving. I’ve had people tell me how “fun” it was to build a macro to handle some one-off text-refactoring problem. But when I looked at what they were doing and how long it took, my honest reaction was: I could have done that in Sublime in a minute with multiple cursors, or just written a quick script. […] That’s what I mean by “invisible tools”. When you’re proficient with your editor of choice—whatever it is—it disappears into the background. But the moment it cannot handle something easily, it stops being invisible. What baffles me is that so many people treat that friction—the effort of working around a tool’s limitations—as the “fun” part, and then advertise it as evidence that the tool is great. […] The text-editor-macro anecdote I mentioned is really about a gap between feeling productive versus being productive . There’s a sensation of cleverness that comes from solving a fiddly problem, and it’s easy to mistake that feeling for actual output. A tool that makes hard things feel heroic and clever feel like an achievement can register as “powerful” while quietly being slow. The honest test isn’t how engaged or clever you felt, it’s wall-clock time and how many mistakes you made getting there. This I had more of a mixed reaction to. I think it’s necessary to expect from tools to get out of the way, but there’s also nothing wrong with having fun with them. My simple go-to example is this: When writing code, I sometimes use Find & Replace All, and am done within a few keystrokes. But sometimes, I press Find and then replace one at a time, jumping methodically through the file, and seeing each string in situ before changing it. I know the tool could do it all for me. I know I could be more efficient. But this intentional slowing down allows me to refamiliarize myself with the code, visit its forgotten nooks and crannies, and make sure I understand where and how the thing I’m changing is actually used. The editor I use allows me to not be efficient when I choose not to be. In my work, flow operates at different speeds; a good tool understands that and doesn’t force me into a particular one. I think ultimately indeed, the tool does need to disappear, and make you be in charge of whatever speed you want to operate at, and how much friction or difficulty you choose to face (do you bump the lamp or not?). But it’s not as simple as always “reducing wall-clock time and mistakes.” Like Cantrell says above: Creativity is fundamentally not an efficiency problem. #ai #craft #flow #toolmaking

go Go programming Programming
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Unsung 2 days ago

Safari and system design, pt. 2

Around the time I was writing about iPhone’s Safari breaking the expected “tap to jump to the top” gesture , a conversation on social media pointed to yet another thing that this tab control does strangely. A typical use of Safari means two groups of sites: a regular set on the right, and “private” pages on the left (this is what Chrome calls “incognito mode”): = 3x)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/safari-and-system-design-pt-2/1-framed.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> As expected, you can tap on either label, and switch to the relevant group with ease: It also feels like you could slide it – and you can, except… …you immediately encounter a Scroll Lock problem . You are not dragging the pill – you are dragging what’s underneath the pill. To switch, you have to go the other way : You can immediately intuit some inherent unpleasant complexity of the whole system – not just in it “going the wrong way,” but also in how it creates room and then contracts it, in two separate steps, after you’re done. The reason is that you can actually have more site groups than just the initial two. You can even drag to where the new site group would be, and create it this way: I normally welcome these kinds of accelerators. But here, this feels overdesigned and confusing, as if someone drugged the tab instead of dragging it. The very same natural gesture – a left swipe – that should feel safe and send you to Private, will now put you in a scary new full-screen/​keyboard-out flow you almost never need. Why this relates to system design is that on/off toggles in iOS were recently redesigned to resemble oblong pills: = 3x)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/safari-and-system-design-pt-2/6-framed.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/safari-and-system-design-pt-2/7-framed.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> Those do respond to dragging as you’d expect: Along the same lines, on the springboard pagination pill, dragging to the right means the next page: And so now the system is schizophrenic and identical-looking design primitives mean the opposite things. It’s as if the computer itself kept randomly pressing Scroll Lock for you, preventing you from developing a solid understanding of the system first, and motor memory second. I think the mistakes made here were twofold. First, the design overoptimized for two unnecessary things: people actually using site groups (not common), and ease of use in creating site groups (not important). My slightly cynical hypothesis is that this design presented really well in demos, which sometimes can derail a project. A more cynical theory is that this led to “accidental discoverability” that made the site group metrics look better . Second, and more important part: This particular design received an exception that it didn’t deserve. No one noticed the systemic challenge of similar UI elements doing opposite things, or people who did were not effective in pushing back. The metrics for new feature discovery are easy; the metrics for user confusion or frustration do not usually exist. This is how interaction systems slowly fall apart. As I mentioned in the first part , it is likely that Safari’s exception will now be treated as “blessed,” and start spreading further. Given enough time, more and more pills will go in whatever direction they want when dragged – and people will learn not to trust any of them. (I know the feature is actually called “ tab groups ” but I called it “site groups” intentionally, because otherwise it’s a tabbed control controlling tab groups, and things get confusing really quickly . Also, thank you to Martin Hoffman for initiating this post.) #flow #interface design #ios #process #system design #touch

design Design ios iOS
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Unsung 2 days ago

“Jokes, art projects, or cruel and unusual punishment”

A fun 19-minute video from commonLuke trying to write a short Fibonacci program in increasingly esoteric languages : = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/jokes-art-projects-or-cruel-and-unusual-punishment/yt1-play.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/jokes-art-projects-or-cruel-and-unusual-punishment/yt1-play.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> Here are the languages: My favourite was Shakespeare , in which the whole program resembles a play. Believe it or not, but this code outputs “HI”: It was interesting for me to see programming languages that intentionally remove some of the niceties and affordances we learned to take for granted. My guess is most of them are just art, or jokes, or a certain one-upmanship. But I couldn’t help but think of Arika Okrent’s excellent book In The Land Of Invented Languages . The book is about “human” languages like Esperanto and Klingon, but it’s much more interesting than I imagined, and maybe even quite a bit sadder: a story of people afflicted with a certain perfectionism who are not willing to accept languages simply cannot be perfect. #coding #craft #youtube Python, Scratch , and assembly (as control), LOLCODE , a language resembling lolcat memes of yore, Piet , a language whose output looks like Piet Mondrian’s abstract art, Brainfuck , whose programs are made chiefly of punctuation, COW , a version of the above where each of the few instructions is a variant of “moo,” Whitespace , whose code consists only of spaces, tabs, and returns, Chef , where programs resemble cooking recipes.

programming Programming entertainment Entertainment culture Culture python Python
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Unsung 4 days ago

“Something seems to be going crucially wrong with the frame rate.”

Let’s Game It Out is a YouTube channel where Josh Knoles occasionally grabs a modern videogame and tries to play it in a particularly creative way – finding bugs, breaking things, doing an action more times than anyone thought possible. What makes it even more fun is that what’s tested often are early access , unfinished games. Here’s an example 27-minute video of a game called Parking Tycoon: = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/something-seems-to-be-going-crucially-wrong-with-the-frame-rate/yt1-play.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/something-seems-to-be-going-crucially-wrong-with-the-frame-rate/yt1-play.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> There are many more . I could tell you that occasionally putting one on teaches me something about bugs or lets me put myself in the mind of a very inventive user. Sure, occasionally, perhaps. But mostly these are just fun to watch. = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/something-seems-to-be-going-crucially-wrong-with-the-frame-rate/1.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/something-seems-to-be-going-crucially-wrong-with-the-frame-rate/1.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> #bugs #games #humor #youtube

gaming Gaming entertainment Entertainment media Media
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Unsung 5 days ago

Five moments in snapping history

Bear (a notetaking tool) has simple image resizing, with one extra nicety – if your images are near each other, resizing one will snap to the width of the other: In the Finder, columns snap to the width necessary to keep all the names untruncated – and not one pixel more: (Sidebar: This is also the only place I’m mentioning today that nicely uses the trackpad’s haptic feedback at the snap moment. I tried to indicate it in the video; this is not the final visual treatment I’m thinking of, but let me know if this kind of visualization of haptics feels useful to you!) macOS does something really interesting when you get its windows close to each other. Instead of typical snapping – pulling the thing you hold toward the other item like a magnet – it instead prevents you from going further for a while, in either direction. Perhaps the right analog here would be glue : If initially feels a bit funny, but I think I like it. It’s less aggressive and avoids needing some sort of cancellation (an option or a modifier key) if you don’t want it, because it never feels in a way. It also works for matching heights, like in Bear: In Figma, building atop regular snapping, we introduced something I awkwardly called “self-snapping”: if your objects are inside a container, the container will snap its padding to whatever it sees on the other side, without any explicit auto layout/​flexbox: I am sharing these five examples (and one from before ) because I think they exemplify a nice thing: precision without bureaucracy. In each case you could imagine an explicit heavy option somewhere in the menu… …that would feel slow and cumbersome. Instead, these take the freedom of direct manipulation and sprinkle just enough almost-invisible structure in a moment where that structure is undeniably useful. (Of course, you still might want explicit options somewhere in the menu or your command palette, if only for accessibility reasons.) I like that these quiet features have your back and make you look good, and that their creators understand that something almost aligned can feel worse than something completely misaligned. #bear #complexity #direct manipulation #interface design #mouse Bear: Set Image Width… macOS: Match Window Heights Finder: Restore Column Width Figma: Unify Padding

design Design frontend Frontend ui UI
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Unsung 5 days ago

“Try quickly typing 1+2+3. I bet you won’t get 6.”

Earlier this month, I talked about a rotation button in photos that behaved really nicely in iOS, and not so great on the Nothing Phone . Here’s a story of a similar fumble iOS once made that might bring the point home even more. The calculator app has been preinstalled on iPhones ever since their debut in 2007. For the longest time it hasn’t been anything more than a standard four-function calculator with a decades-old feature set. If you’re not careful, however, you can mess up even that. Ten years into iPhone’s history, iOS 11 introduced a problem just like the Nothing Phone rotation – quickly tapping on keys would show them as responding, but the actual action wouldn’t be registered. Michael Tsai’s aggregator’s first entry has a video from Stephen Heaps: It shows typing 1+2+3+4 where iOS forgets one press of +, resulting in 1+23+4 = 28. Many more people posted about it afterwards, and showed various other examples . It is oddly enthralling to see a computer fail at basic math. But what’s particularly historically interesting and perhaps even more embarrassing for Apple is the absolutely rich history of solving this kind of a problem. Calculators evolved alongside typewriters as the earliest devices with button-like (as opposed to piano-like) keyboards. But the stakes were different. Imagine a badly constructed typewriter and all the ways it can disappoint you: the letter might be faint if you press the key lightly or puncture the paper if you press it too hard, the output might be misaligned, or the typebars will jam in some way, forcing you to go again. A typewriter has to work hard to divvy up a blank, analog piece of paper into a reliable grid via escapements, ratchets, and so on. But a calculator’s work to convince the analog world to be digital is more important. After all, it’s not likely that the typewriter key you pressed will output the wrong letter – but on a badly constructed calculator, a light press of 5 could absolutely output 4, or 6, or 4.5. And, while the typewriters only take your words verbatim, the calculator’s job is precisely to create new numbers out of the numbers you type. An imprecise mechanism can mess up that math. A jam could perform a partial or nondeterministic calculation. Adding 1 to 999,999 and the force necessary for the resulting cascading carry could break a device in the middle of work. On top of all that, languages have a built-in redundancy. Evn if yuo mak many typoes, th sentece can stil be understod. But all numbers basically look alike. A calculator could make a mistake when it comes to a number that is absolutely vital for your payroll, for engineering, or for navigation – and you would never spot it. Understanding all this, many calculator makers even already in the 19th century spent a wild amount of effort convincing people not just that their devices are helpful, and fast, and easy to use, but also that they can be trusted . Buttons were carefully weighted. Comptometers came with a locking mechanism. If a machine felt something didn’t go right, it would stop working and require a hard reset. The message was: “You can trust me, because I won’t ever show you bad math, and I’ll stop myself before I will ever lie to you.” Charles Babbage was so confident in his Difference Engine that he welcomed people to try to mess with its mechanical wheels in the middle of the calculation, confident even a sabotaged machine won’t ever make a mistake. Just like with the Selectric decades later , those things were solved by people who cared, in the much harsher mechanical conditions. Of course, I don’t expect everybody at Apple core iOS team to be a calculator UI historian (although it would be nice for at least one person on the team to be one!). It is embarrassing that no one on the team had enough imagination to realize that making a button respond to a quick press during animation, but not register it would cause all sorts of serious trouble. (The bug was fixed in iOS 11.2 by removing the animations, and subsequently the animations were brought back without the original problem in iOS 11.3.) But maybe the bigger embarrassment is that Apple didn’t have a battery of tests to run on top of the UI at various speeds, mimicking fingers of what must be millions of people using the calculator app. That, too, has been a standard procedure for decades. = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/try-quickly-typing-123-i-bet-you-wont-get-6/2.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/try-quickly-typing-123-i-bet-you-wont-get-6/2.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/try-quickly-typing-123-i-bet-you-wont-get-6/3.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/try-quickly-typing-123-i-bet-you-wont-get-6/3.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> Those tests seemed missing in 2017. I hope 2+3+4 years later that’s no longer the case. #apple #bugs #flow #history #real world #touch

ios iOS hardware Hardware performance Performance
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Unsung 6 days ago

“Is this acceptable? Not really. Is it understandable? Absolutely.”

When you visit parts of the website of the Driver & Vehicle Licensing Agency in the U.K. outside of standard office hours, you will see this: = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/is-this-acceptable-not-really-is-it-understandable-absolutely/1.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/is-this-acceptable-not-really-is-it-understandable-absolutely/1.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> It seems ridiculous, almost like the famous 500-mile email bug , but Dafydd Vaughan explains how it came to be . It won’t be a surprise that the story starts with an old computer system, built around a day/night cadence where people would visit the agency during the day, the information would be collected, and all the data processing would happen overnight: At the time, many of DVLA’s services – particularly those relating to driving licences were still backed by an old IBM mainframe from the 1980s – fondly known as Drivers-90 (or D90 for short). D90 was your typical mainframe – code written in COBOL using the ADABAS database package. Most data processing happened “offline” – through batch jobs which ran during an overnight window. The team upgrading it in 2013 decided to not attack too many things at once, and swap the innards but keep the day/night system intact. I’ll let you read some details inside if you are interested, and if you want to learn why the 2013 decision is still a 2026 (or at least 2025) reality. Like many of these , it is a story of heavy financial and technical constraints. But I will excerpt this bit, because I think many teams in any company – design systems, security, or “core” (whatever that happens to be) – would relate to it: It’s difficult for an organisation to keep its focus and attention on a complex upgrade – particularly without getting noticeable benefits along the way. The tricky part is that in many places you do end up in a legacy situation that is exactly as absurd as “an internet service having opening hours,” but you might be too close to the problem to even realize it. #maintenance #software evolution

business Business backend Backend
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Unsung 6 days ago

“Maze of pages, redirects, and confirmation emails”

Nikita Prokopov on his fun Tumblr-like site Grumpy Website that collects UI transgressions with light commentary: = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/maze-of-pages-redirects-and-confirmation-emails/1.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/maze-of-pages-redirects-and-confirmation-emails/1.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> Why log in when you have to, when you can instead experience the same Kafkaesque maze of pages, redirects, confirmation emails, copying codes, and searching for a second device—all a week in advance? I agree with authentication experiences being absolutely horrible, especially in the corporate context. But I think the “your login expires in 5 days” callout is actually positive. Your reauthentication will happen anyway according to the security regimen. Instead of it potentially surprising you at a wrong moment – for example just before, or in the middle of the presentation in front of a boss – you could get ahead on that process during the next moment of downtime, and have some peace of mind. I know Slack has a similar warning, although I don’t happen to have a screenshot handy; I imagine a few other places do, too. (However, that gesture doesn’t give apps permission to handle expiring credentials badly. There should be no excuse for losing anything the user is doing – for example writing a long comment – just because the reauthentication kicks in in the middle of them doing that. Even the app losing its mind for a while just as its separate parts are waking up to the reality of reauthentication at their own pace and throwing strange errors, but the login screen hasn’t reappeared yet, can be really confusing.) #attention #nikita prokopov #security

web Web ai AI
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Unsung 1 weeks ago

The Swiss Cheese model, pt. 1

Have you head of the Swiss Cheese model ? You see it sometimes in descriptions of how complex systems fail. The visual usually goes like this: = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/the-swiss-cheese-model-pt-1/1.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/the-swiss-cheese-model-pt-1/1.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> The whole idea is: even if you have multiple layers of safety – like many slices of cheese – there are always holes in each slice. Typically, a hole in any slice is covered by a non-hole in the previous one or the next one. (For example, a car might not allow you to grab your keys if you have not shifted to park – or, if you start driving with a handbrake on by accident, the car might yell at you.) But occasionally, the holes just happen to line up, and a larger disaster strikes. The model is used in analyses of past accidents, and prevention of future ones. It has proponents and detractors. It’s hard to talk about its applications because the most common examples are horrific. In my book, I wrote about Therac-25 , and that was a really unpleasant chapter to research and to write. Other go-to case studies are equally bleak: Chernobyl , Challenger , the Tenerife airport disaster , the Deepwater Horizon explosion . But I wanted to share it because in my head it applies to UI design also, and sometimes helps me think of how small details add up to a larger whole. In this first part, let’s start with a more traditional example, although a non-drastic one. Here’s a story of Knight Capital Group, a financial services and trading firm. I’m going to hand off the summary of the accident to Henrico Dolfing : On the morning of August 1, 2012, Knight Capital Group opened its systems for what should have been a routine trading day, yet within minutes the firm began sending a flood of unintended orders into the U.S. equity market, buying high and selling low across dozens of stocks in a pattern that made no economic sense and could not be stopped through normal controls. What initially appeared as unusual market activity quickly escalated into a systemic failure inside one of the largest market makers in the United States, with algorithms behaving in ways that neither traders nor engineers could fully understand in real time. […] By the time the issue was identified and the system shut down roughly 45 minutes later, Knight had generated more than 4 million executions across 154 stocks, covering approximately 397 million shares, and accumulated positions worth billions of dollars, resulting in losses of more than $460 million […]. The scale of the incident was not only financial but structural, as a single deployment failure had propagated through a system responsible for a meaningful share of U.S. equity trading. […] Here’s what happened. Long ago, the firm built a pretty boring function called Power Peg to automate some transactions. The function used a standard shared limiter that made it stop executing when all the required transactions were fulfilled. After some years in use, the function was deprecated in 2003 and stopped being used then, but crucially, the code was never actually removed. Some time in between 2003 and 2012, the limiter functionality was upgraded, and the old code stopped being compatible with it. All code in production was rewritten to use the new limiter, but the Power Peg feature wasn’t, as it was already deprecated and not in use. In 2012, the firm started writing a new program for automated transactions. Its creators decided to reuse the same software flag that previously activated Power Peg. The existence of the old code was known at the time, and the idea was that the code would be overwritten by the new program, so the reused flag would only trigger new code. In July 2012, the new code was finished and the firm started to install it on all the servers, overwriting Power Peg. The firm intended to deploy the new code to all eight servers, but a mistake resulted in it only arriving on seven servers. No one caught that mistake. At this point, you can piece it all together. At this point, I imagine many of you have been wincing more and more with each passing paragraph. On August 1, the flag for the new functionality was turned on. Everything was fine on seven servers, but on the eighth one, the flag reawakened dormant code that immediately started executing. As the old code was not compatible with the new limiter, it was never limited, cascading into millions of transactions in less than an hour, and a lot of collateral damage; the subsequent market reaction to the news of the firm losing over $400 million and caused its own stock to tank. Oh yeah, I didn’t mention this yet – the failure killed the firm. (Well, it resulted in a merger, but that seemed to be a way to save face after Knight Capital Group almost went under.) How does the Swiss Cheese apply to this? You can see it as five holes in five different slices of cheese: What’s important to understand about this model is that either of these in isolation would objectively be a small mistake, and caught by the other slides. As a matter of fact, any four of these happening would still not add up to a catastrophe. But in this case, the five mistakes lined up perfectly. Many analyses of such accidents blame a single event in the chain – in this case often the sysadmin that didn’t deploy the code to eight servers properly – but this is primarily because we like stories of individual agency, and are not well equipped to understand stories of systems . (Even Star Trek added a Borg Queen, after all.) That’s the accident eventually dubbed “a Knightmare.” More examples of systems closer to our hearts in following parts. #bugs #definitions it was a mistake to not actually remove the old code it was a mistake to reuse the same flag it was a mistake to not deploy to all 8 servers it was a mistake to not have a procedure for someone to double check the deployment it was a mistake to not have a way of auto-detecting (and perhaps auto-stopping) the runaway processes when the regular limiter failed

business Business security Security go Go design Design
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Unsung 1 weeks ago

text.makeup

I am generally not someone who cares much for easter eggs (unless they come with interesting stories ), but John Gruber’s one-liner made me pause for an unexpected reasons: Joanna Stern explains why this emoji is correct today: 📅. (This one too: 📆) I thought the two different calendars was some trickery, but the answer is simpler than that. I did not realize that, inexplicably, there are two distinct calendar emoji: one for calendar, and one for a tear-off calendar. The way I learned about it was to use a tool I made a few years ago called text.makeup : I thought this would be a nice opportunity to share it with you. If you’re debugging a string you don’t understand, or are just interested in learning about various Unicode or encoding secrets through playing (see the left sidebar!), it might be a fun thing to use. I just updated it with the most recent emoji (and Unicode goodies) that will drop after September this year. #encoding #marcin wichary #toolmaking #typography

programming Programming web-development Web Development design Design
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Unsung 1 weeks ago

“No such thing as too fast”

On Mastodon , Alex Russell, a product architect who’s worked on Chrome and Edge, and has focused on tech standards for a while: Once Upon A Time At Google, a team presented results that had confounded them: making the system load several times faster increased engagement somewhat, but in line with Tammy’s findings, engagement went way up for every 100ms improvement below the 1s threshold. Going fast enough to become “dial tone” changed user behaviour and expectations in a hugely positive way for the product. This sort of “no such thing as too fast until you prove it” lesson is everywhere . Phrasing it as “no such thing as too fast” is really interesting, and not something I encountered before. (The way I understand the “dial tone” remark is commenting on reliability of landline phones in the second half of last century. The landlines were extremely reliable and even came with their own power source; you could pick up the handset and the dial tone – the system’s confirmation it’s ready for you to dial – was inevitably and immediately always there, already waiting for you. There was never any delay when the phone had to get ready for you to call.) Russell links to a report by Tammy Everts : If you make websites for a living, stop what you’re doing and read this research by Tammy Everts; it shows what many of us have been saying for a long time: even if there is such a thing as “fast enough” (there isn’t), it’s generally much faster than you are targeting. The report itself is perhaps too deep and jargony for this blog, but the TL; DR seems to be: Google suggests the time for the site to finish loading its largest piece is 2.5 seconds, and Everts argues and shows evidence that it’s a lot less. I have before focused on “finger speed” – making sure the interactions operate at the “speed of flow,” which requires sweating speeds counted in milliseconds. Everts’s and Russell’s comments confirm that millisecond-speeds matter for other reasons, too. #performance #web

frontend Frontend web-development Web Development performance Performance
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Unsung 1 weeks ago

“It would’ve been much simpler to just use an animated cigar.”

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: = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/it-wouldve-been-much-simpler-to-just-use-an-animated-cigar/yt1-play.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/it-wouldve-been-much-simpler-to-just-use-an-animated-cigar/yt1-play.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> 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.) #above and beyond #craft #games #motion design #youtube

movies Movies entertainment Entertainment
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Unsung 1 weeks ago

Max one weird thing

If you want to record the screen from your iPhone on your Mac, open the QuickTime Player app but ignore New Screen Recording, and click on New Movie Recording instead. = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/max-one-weird-thing/1.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/max-one-weird-thing/1.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> This instruction is a fever dream of three weird things in sequence: It’s interesting to me to think how we got here: = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/max-one-weird-thing/2.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/max-one-weird-thing/2.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/max-one-weird-thing/3.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/max-one-weird-thing/3.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> Long ago, the Player was the only free, consumer-facing part of QuickTime, so it needed special branding. You could purchase QuickTime Pro – you would even get aggressive ad banners for it inside Mac OS! – and its encoding and saving capabilities would then be sprinkled across the entire system. = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/max-one-weird-thing/4.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/max-one-weird-thing/4.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> “New Movie Recording” originally offered recording from external video cameras (like iSight , another cute name). “New Screen Recording” was added later, for recording from internal screens. My guess is that technically, architecturally, or both, it was easier to treat external screens (like iPhone or Apple TV) as external video cameras since the UI and affordances matched them more closely. So that’s why screen recording from external devices ended up under “New Movie Recording.” As a UX historian, this is fun and fascinating! I love tracing back that kind of stuff and learning how certain strange things came to be. As a user… not so much. “If you want to record the screen from your iPhone on your Mac, open the QuickTime Player app but ignore New Screen Recording, and click on New Movie Recording instead.” This feels thrice arbitrary, closer to a magical incantation than a computer command, requiring you to hold a bunch of counterintuitive things in your head, or look them up every time. “Wait, what was the strange name?“ “Yeah, it’s called a player, but that’s ok.” “Hmm, I remember something about not choosing the obvious command.“ I have this internal rule that a flow or a space in the UI should have at most one weird thing. I can’t prove it to you mathematically, and I would be the first to find exceptions to my own rule. But one weird thing makes me nervous, and two or more weird things in concert raise the hair at the back of my neck. Two weird things is when the “launch blocking” bulb lights up in my head. Work needs to happen to bring the weirdness count back to 1 or 0. This is one example of what I dragged Apple earlier for : it’s not just speed that matters. It’s noticing this kind of complexity, places where an easy way was chosen, design debt accumulated, and things got simply too weird. Apple allowed three weird things to accumulate here. (By the way, delightful weird doesn’t count! But it’s hard for me to imagine anyone defending these three things above as delightful or positive in any way.) “If you want to record the screen from your iPhone on your Mac, open the QuickTime Player app but ignore New Screen Recording, and click on New Movie Recording instead.” “If you want to record the screen from your iPhone on your Mac, open the Recorder app and click on New Screen Recording.” It’s not trivial to get to this or something similar, but it’s also not really hard . You can get rid of weird things, but you need to want it. #apple #change management #complexity What on earth is “QuickTime”? I am recording with a player ? Why can’t I choose the option that describes exactly what I want to do? QuickTime is a 1990s brand, an offshoot of QuickDraw. Instead of QuickAnimate or QuickPlay, Apple called it QuickTime because it felt cute: time is what separates static images from video. The branding was much more prominent in the 1990s and 2000s, but mostly fell out of use – searching for “quicktime” in system settings today, for example, yields zero results. Long ago, the Player was the only free, consumer-facing part of QuickTime, so it needed special branding. You could purchase QuickTime Pro – you would even get aggressive ad banners for it inside Mac OS! – and its encoding and saving capabilities would then be sprinkled across the entire system. “New Movie Recording” originally offered recording from external video cameras (like iSight , another cute name). “New Screen Recording” was added later, for recording from internal screens. My guess is that technically, architecturally, or both, it was easier to treat external screens (like iPhone or Apple TV) as external video cameras since the UI and affordances matched them more closely. So that’s why screen recording from external devices ended up under “New Movie Recording.”

ios iOS tutorial Tutorial
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Unsung 1 weeks ago

Sets of overlapping circles

This is a design joke that always makes me laugh: = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/sets-of-overlapping-circles/1.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/sets-of-overlapping-circles/1.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> This was made by… someone, a while back, I believe in response to the Twitter logo redesign of 2012, which showed the new logomark as composed of exclusively circles: = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/sets-of-overlapping-circles/2.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/sets-of-overlapping-circles/2.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> Now, to be clear: that Twitter logo redesign was gorgeous, and I do not particularly care if it was designed out of circles or whatever else. I don’t even think its announcement was presented in a overly pretentious way – it was nowhere near the 2008 bloviating Pepsi redesign or the rank amateurism of Yahoo’s new 2013 logo . It’s just… design can be so pretentious and up its own golden-ratioed ass, and I can’t help but love anything piercing that bubble. (In my perfect, naïve world, Doug Bowman – the designer behind the logo – also finds the joke hilarious!) Also, I feel like design is just not… funny, all that often. Quick, think of any product design joke. See what I mean? I can’t, either. My favourite graphic design joke is “if it’s big and ugly, it’s not big enough.” (You know, it’s funny because it’s sad.)

design Design culture Culture
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Unsung 1 weeks ago

“Cursed knowledge we have learned that we wish we never knew.”

Immich is a self-hosted photo/​video app, and one of their side pages is Cursed Knowledge : Cursed knowledge we have learned as a result of building Immich that we wish we never knew. = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/cursed-knowledge-we-have-learned-that-we-wish-we-never-knew/1.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/cursed-knowledge-we-have-learned-that-we-wish-we-never-knew/1.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> There is something about this format that I really enjoyed as a reflection but also as a way to share with others – simple one sentence/​paragraph updates with links, so you can inhale quickly but also go deep if needed. There’s some overlap with bugs here, but it’s not necessarily only buggy stuff – also quirks of formats, observations, etc. I made a cursed knowledge page for Unsung – let me know! (Thanks to Casey Gollan for posting about the original page.)

web-development Web Development programming Programming open-source Open Source
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Unsung 1 weeks ago

“If HEIC has no haters I’m dead.”

Over on Bluesky, Melanie Walsh asks : Favorite and least favorite file formats? I’ll start. Favorite: TXT Least favorite: HEIC The answers – both replies and quote posts – are really interesting because most of the time they’re not about inherent capabilities of each format, but: Of course, Walsh put a finger on the scale with her initial example, but HEIC stands out as a favorite least favorite. I understand this is mostly out of its limited support, raising a question whether Apple spent the right amount of time socializing and incentivizing its adoption – even on a Mac, you can’t escape blank stares the moment you drag it into many websites/web apps: HEIC on the other hand, Apple’s way of making photos smaller and everything else more complicated than it needs to be. By the way HEIC is when you drag a picture from your Notes app into your email, and then it laughs in your face and is like sorry, girl, I’m HEIC!! I don’t do things like that!! I didn’t know I had a least favorite file format but yeah HEIC can fuck right off Sweet fucking hell fuck heic into the sun Reading the replies here makes me feel like I live in an oddly privileged bubble in an inverse of the usual meaning of privilege for being a poor Android-using mfer who has never seen a HEIC in their life and had to actually look that sh*t up. Least favorite is a toss up between HEIC (WHICH NOBODY ASKED FOR, APPLE) and WEBP Controversial but I hope everyone involved with HEIC only tastes soap instead of cilantro forever I agree with this person that WebP is much better supported than it used to, but it sometimes takes one link in the chain – cough Google Docs cough – for you to avoid a format forever. And, those are always lagging indicators. If a format didn’t work once in an important flow, it might take many years before you come back: all the people saying “webp” in the quotes might as well be fighting WW2 still. look for another grievance. please Some other fun answers: IF IT’S CALLED [C]OMMA [S]EPARATED [V]ALUES WHY DO I HAVE TO OPEN A WINDOW AND CHANGE THE DEFAULT DELIMITER OPTION FROM TAB TO COMMA ??!?!?! Favorite: MP3 (invented piracy, patents all expired, doesn’t need an FPU) Least favorite: DICOM (nightmarish metadata, too many possible image encodings, when it wants a 3D volume the solution is just “a bunch of files in a folder”, also IT IS A NETWORK PROTOCOL >:( ) Least fave: .R01, .R02, etc... – nothing needs to be split into multiple rar files! Please stop! The world has moved beyond this. Least favorite: can I count those awful pointer doc types Google uses, like .gdoc and .gsheet favorite: transparent PNG least favorite: transparent PNG that is not really transparent but just a fuckin checkered background I forgot about this meme: = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/if-heic-has-no-haters-im-dead/1.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/if-heic-has-no-haters-im-dead/1.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> For least fav I voted for GIF, having not only spent countless hours trying to make good-looking animated gifs that do not weigh tens of megabytes, look horrible, and cause performance issues… but also having worked on two different products (Medium and Figma) that had to swallow gifs made by others, and seeing engineers lose their minds peeking into their insides and how messy they were . To be fair, GIF comes from the late 1980s, and simply outlived its purpose. It’s a fascinating format that literally deserves a book written about it: the messy patent wars, the pronunciation, the technical format and many surprises hiding inside , even the word “gifs” transcending the format itself to mean “short animated memes.” To go back to the thread, a small pattern that I also encountered from time to time: Least favorite: .md, specifically when it’s used for Sega Genesis game roms. There’s already a type of text file type called .md, so Windows tries to open them in notepad. Just call it .gen instead, nerd. Favorite: TS, the one that opens in my IDE Least Favorite: TS, the one that opens in Quicktime Lastly, because of course someone had to do it: Favorite: Gaylord Archival® Reinforced Acid Free Manilla Least favorite: Office Depot Vertical Hanging Folders #encoding #graphics #software evolution how well supported it is in the general ecosystem? how painful it was last time I used it? who’s using it and for what? if there is one app I use it with, do I like this app? (interesting in the context of PDFs which some people love, and others hate)

mobile Mobile typescript TypeScript frontend Frontend web Web
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Unsung 1 weeks ago

More absolutely strange Google shortcuts

I’m endlessly confounded (as a user) and fascinated (as a designer) when it comes the shortcut conventions in Google’s professional web apps. They seem… bad, but bad in a strange, inexplicable, enthralling way. Previously , we encountered this: = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/more-absolutely-strange-google-shortcuts/1.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/more-absolutely-strange-google-shortcuts/1.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> The lessons there were, primarily: don’t… do this, and also maybe don’t show it like this. Today’s entrant, from Google Drive, offers a different lesson: = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/more-absolutely-strange-google-shortcuts/2.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/more-absolutely-strange-google-shortcuts/2.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> Immediately, I have so many questions. Why a sequenced shortcut instead of something simpler, in a space where there aren’t that many shortcuts? Why Control of all things? On a Mac? Why is it so different than Google Docs in every way – don’t you all talk to each other? And why not a proper typographical symbol for Control (^ is not ⌃)? But there is also a mechanical lesson here. I’d encourage you to actually press any of these three shortcuts, and watch your fingers doing that. I bet you will observe one of two ways: Turns out, people are messy when it comes to modifier keys. That messiness was even encouraged from the very first day we breathed life into the very first modifier key. Most of 20th century typewriters had a full stop and a comma on both shifted and unshifted positions – pressing Shift was heavy early on, and this helped when punctuating all-caps sentences or preparing for a capital letter starting the next sentence. (Also, Shift Lock wasn’t as smart as Caps Lock is.) = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/more-absolutely-strange-google-shortcuts/3.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/more-absolutely-strange-google-shortcuts/3.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> But even without that encouragement there are still two legitimately valid ways to understand “^C then F” – you release ⌃ before the second key, or after – but Google Drive only listens to the first one. Couple this with giving you zero feedback after ⌃C, and I won’t be surprised if many people try this sequence once, and give up assuming it’s just not working. So, it feels it’d be good to think about being extra forgiving here, the same way it’s good to think about “coyote time.” As always, please let me know if you see the method in this alleged madness . After all, the goal for this blog is not to blindly ridicule things, but to learn together through thick and thin. #google #keyboard ⌃ down, C down, C up, ⌃ up, F down, F up ⌃ down, C down, C up, F down, F up, ⌃ up

programming Programming design Design web Web
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