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 gets 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 […]

Pretty funny reverse review of the evolution of macOS, starting from the latest — Tahoe: Apple’s first desktop operating system was Tahoe. Like any first version, it had a lot of issues. Users and critics flooded the web with negative reviews. While mostly stable under the hood, the outer shell — the visual user interface […]

An archive documenting the panic that often greets new technologies.

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.

Jasmine Sun: Most text is not creative. Emails, policy papers, reported news. It does not desire to surprise or delight. It aims to convey ideas and information as clearly as possible. It is inevitable—given this reality and these incentives—that most people will soon use AI to write most things.

More continue to flock to Substack, as if the last 10 years taught us nothing: Expect enclosure; expect a few big winners; expect advertising, with all the attention-hacking that will demand. Expect, also, that writers will con­tinue to mold their work to fit Sub­stack’s par­tic­ular ecology, rather than “merely” use the tools to pursue their […]

Robert Saltzman pressed Claude into thinking about itself — with some interesting results. At a certain point it even declared itself self-aware, full stop. What looks like introspection though is just a performance of it: statistical answers based on patterns that fit with what introspection and self-awareness look like. With what we (us) expect it […]