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Sanding UI
One of the ways I like to do development is to build something, click around a ton , make tweaks, click around more, more tweaks, more clicks, etc., until I…
Jim Nielsen
Writing about the big beautiful mess that is making things for the world wide web.
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Visit blog.jim-nielsen.com → RSS feedOn Hacker News Jun 2021 – Oct 2026
Web & Frontend 16Life, Learning & Writing 8Tech Industry & Business 8Software Engineering 7Design & UX 6Society, Policy & Culture 5
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We’re all just temporarily abled
That’s a quote from Cindy Li — “We're all just temporarily abled”. I first heard it in Sara’s course and it’s been on repeat in my mind ever since June 6th…
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You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it
Here’s Dave Rupert ( from my notes ): the goal of a book isn’t to get to the last page, it’s to expand your thinking. I have to constantly remind myself of…
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Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help
I complained about this on the socials , but I didn’t get it all out of my system. So now I write a blog post. I’ve never liked the philosophy of “put an icon…
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What “work” looks like
Collaboration is amazing! There’s absolutely no trade-offs, right? The mantra of sharing your work and involving everyone in decisions naturally leads to…
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Don't let anyone take away your big box of cables
Speaking of being on the internet and finding things that make you go, “Hey! It’s not just me!” I scrolled across this skeet from Tyler Gaw : I just dug to the…
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Canistilluse.com
There’s something beautiful about the website caniuse.com which I never fully appreciated until last week when news spread that alert , prompt , and confirm…
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Inspecting Web Views in macOS
I recently received a tantalizing email from a reader I’ve never met: Sam Henri-Gold . Sam showed me how you can key in a couple write commands in the macOS…
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No more icons in every menu by default
Have you heard the good news? I bemoaned the approach of putting an icon in every menu item by default which shipped with macOS Tahoe — but now it’s gone in…
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Offline is just online with extreme latency
I just finished watching “Local-first Software” by Peter Van Hardenberg and loved it! He talks about changing the paradigm we’re currently in where a program…
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Blogging can just be stating the obvious
John Gruber writes about those annoying popups every website seems to have now and while he does a great job tearing into these ubiquitous, user-hostile…
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Tags to make HTML work like you expect
I was watching Alex Petros’ talk and he has a slide in there titled “Incantations that make HTML work correctly”. This got me thinking about the basic snippets…
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HTML Web Components
I think the word “component” in “web components” confused a lot of people — at least it did me. “Web components” sounded like the web platform’s equivalent to…
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The optional chaining operator, “modern” browsers, and my mom
Eric Bailey recently wrote on CSS-Tricks about testing your website on a crappy laptop and it reminded me of this anecdote from my own life. About a month ago…
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Examples of Great URL Design (2023)
Here’s Kyle Aster on why thoughtful URL design is important (in 2010) : URLs are universal. They work in Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer, cURL…
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Deno Is Webby
The Deno team recently shipped Deno by example : Deno by example is a collection of annotated examples for how to use Deno, and the various features it…
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The Mac app flea market
Have you ever searched for “AI chat” in the Mac App Store? I have. It’s like strolling through one of those counterfeit, replica markets where all the goods…
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The AI Aesthetic
Every zeitgeist comes with new design idioms unique to its challenges. Many of them disappear as fads change, but others bake themselves into deeper parts of…
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The OG Social Network: Other People’s Websites
“Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.” That’s Google’s stated mission. But what if the world's information becomes…
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How to make websites that will require lots of your time and energy
Some lessons I’ve learned from experience. 1. Install Stuff Indiscriminately From npm Become totally dependent on others , that’s why they call them…
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The art of knowing when to quit
Closing time, every new beginning Comes from some other beginning’s end, yeah “Closing Time”, Semisonic Have you ever found yourself saying: That movie was…
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Building websites with lots of little HTML pages
And by LLMS I mean: (L)ots of (L)ittle ht(M)l page(S). I recently shipped some updates to my blog. Through the design/development process, I had some insights…
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UI is a function of your organization
The Domino’s “Pizza Tracker” is an intriguing piece of UI. As an end user, it provides the precision of detail you want in tracking your order: Your order has…
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No Need for Retirement When Utopia Is Around the Corner
I’ve mentioned before my interest in the history and development of nuclear weapons . Currently, I’m reading The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War…
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HTML Web Components: An Example
In my article on HTML web components , I said: But the unique power of web components (in the browser) is that they can render before JavaScript. React…
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Can we stop with the uptime percentages?
I was reading Jason Gorman’s article “The Wall Confronting Reliable Coding Agent Autonomy” and he says: the journey from 90% to 99% reliability is just as hard…
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CSS System Colors (2021)
In another episode of “I’ve been a web designer for how long and am only now learning about this?” let’s talk about CSS system colors. Background On my blog, I…
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Deadlines as Technology
Confession: I’ve never felt like a very productive person. During the mobile app explosion, circa ~2009, I remember trying all kinds of different…
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Useful and useless code comments
I’ve been reading John Ousterhout’s A Philosophy of Software Design . At one point in the book, he gives this advice about code comments: Unfortunately, many…
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Dear Software Makers
Marques Brownlee just released a video essay titled “Dear YouTube” . I loved it. He talks about how YouTube is going to start shipping this new feature where…