211
FlightAware Map Design (2024)
Designing new map styles for FlightAware
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,346 posts.
212
Why JPEG XL ignoring bit depth is genius (and why AVIF can't pull it off)
JPEG and AVIF are locked to 8, 10 or 12 bits. JPEG XL works in float32 with the XYB color space, so bit depth stops mattering. Here’s why that helps HDR.
213
Movie posters from Ghana in the 1980s and 90s
Discover the wild world of Ghanaian and Nigerian hand-painted movie posters. Created by local artists in the 1980s and 1990s, these bold, surreal artworks turned Hollywood films into folk art masterpieces that are so bad they’re brilliant.
214
What happened to Apple's legendary attention to detail?
A long rant about Apple's design choices.
215
Designing software for things that rot
Building an iOS fermentation tracker with HACCP-style decision trees for home charcuterie, salami curing, and fermented foods - food safety without internet strangers.
216
Where's the AI design Renaissance?
AI design is currently overhyped · Will AI take design jobs? · What should designers focus on in light of rapidly changing AI tools?
217
Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable
Acrobat is intrusive, slow and non-customizable. Of course there are alternatives, specifically bad ones...
218
Recreating the Canon Cat document interface
Exploring the emergence of user conventions in a minimal system.
219
Syntax highlighting is a waste of an information channel (2020)
No newsletter next week Running the TLA+ workshop. No way I'm gonna have any brainpower after that. Syntax highlighting is a waste of an information channel...
220
The Spilhaus Projection: A world map according to fish
When Mr Lewin began explaining how cartographers addressed the challenge of portraying what is essentially a three dimensional object - the world - on a two dimensional plane - a piece of paper - my eyes lit up!
221
How to tame a user interface using a spreadsheet
Many years ago, while working at Apple and running a lab at WWDC, I met a guy who was using a piece of Apple software designed for creating interactive ads t...
222
Liquid Glass Is Cracked, and Usability Suffers in iOS 26
iOS 26’s visual language obscures content instead of letting it take the spotlight. New (but not always better) design patterns replace established conventions.
223
Dark patterns: Buying a Bahncard at Deutsche Bahn
How do two well liked companies, deutsche Bahn and adobe, advertise their subscriptions? Badly. Deutsche Bahn, the fully state-owned railway company, is a we
224
How Apple designs a virtual knob (2012)
💡 Author's note: This unpublished post was originally written in May 2012, and refreshed for publication in November 2022.
225
The Flummoxagon
We’re excited to announce Flummoxagon, a new geometric puzzle game that might just leave you flummoxed. Imagine a mash-up of Pentominoes and Sudoku. Your goal is to fit all the pieces into the hexa…
226
Ohno Type School: A (2020)
OH no Type Co. Retail and custom typefaces. Life’s a thrill, fonts are chill!
227
What is “good taste” in software engineering?
Technical taste is different from technical skill. You can be technically strong but have bad taste, or technically weak with good taste. Like taste in general…
228
Users only care about 20% of your application
I often destroyed our home computer when I was a kid. Armed with only 2GB of storage, I'd constantly hunt for files to delete to save space. But I learned the hard way that .ini files are actually imp
229
How to draw construction equipment for kids
What makes "Road Builders," written by B.G. Hennessy and illustrated by Simms Taback, so charming
230
Is a movie prop the ultimate laptop bag?
A while back I attended a Cloudflare board meeting and carried my laptop in a brown paper bag from a grocery store. This elicited a few com...
231
macOS becomes iOS: Safari video controls
At WWDC 2018, Apple Senior Vice President of Software Engineering Craig Federighi asked, “Are you merging iOS and macOS?” This rhetorical question was presumably in response to widespread criticism. Federighi's rhetorical answer was, “No. Of course not.”
232
Designing NotebookLM
Designer, builder, and visual storyteller. Now building Huxe. Previously led design on NotebookLM and contributed to Google AI projects like Gemini and Search. Also shoot photo/video for brands like Coachella, GoPro, and Rivian.
233
AI tools are making the world look weird
LLMs think WEIRD - Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic. STRAT7 explores what AI cultural bias means for researchers working across global markets.
234
Configuration files are user interfaces
We have all been there. Your software keeps growing and you feel the need to make it customizable. It is too soon for a full-blown UI with all the bells and whistles, so your pragmatic instinct suggests a text-based configuration file. Yes, that’s exactly it! You rejoice knowing the software’s configuration will be…
235
This website has no class
Going “full CSS Zen Garden” with modern CSS.
236
Apple Photos app corrupts images
The Apple Photos app sometimes corrupts images when importing from my camera. I just wanted to make a blog post about it in case anyone else runs into the problem. I’ve seen other references to this online, but most of the people gave up trying to fix it, and none of them went as far as I did to debug the issue. I’ll…
237
Just Use HTML
I’ve worked on so many projects recently that were more complicated than they needed to be because they used JavaScript to generate HTML. JavaScript is… Slower to load Slower to run More prone to breaking Harder to read and reason about Doesn’t actually look like the final output It’s inferior to just using HTML in…
238
Rules for creating good-looking user interfaces
Creating good-looking user interfaces has always been a struggle for me. If you’re in the same camp, this might help.
239
"Your" vs. "My" in user interfaces
Adam Silver – interaction designer – London, UK
240
Apple has a private CSS property to add Liquid Glass effects to web content
I have an incredibly boring summer hobby: looking at the changelog for the WebKit Github repo. Why? Because I spend a chunk of my professional life working with webviews inside mobile apps and I like to get an early peek into what's coming in the next version of iOS. Since