Best of 2024

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2024. 99 posts.

Design & UX
36

Golden Rules of Interface Design (2013)

I have often been asked to distill the vast corpus of user interface design into a few key principles. While I was reluctant to do this, it turned out to be a good exercise to write “Golden Rules,” that are applicable in most interactive systems. These principles, derived from experience and refined over three…

44

Gnome Files: A detailed UI examination

A great amount of my writing on this site revolves around complaining about modern user interface design . Some people agree with me, some don't. Most probably don't care at all. That's fine. What I find interesting is that many (but not all!) people who disagree either present extremely specific non-argument nitpicks…

55

Time-Based CSS Animations

In my earlier post Time Uniform For CSS Animation, I took a note about a way to do CSS animations with time ticks instead of keyframes. It was limited applicable because CSS lacked the ability of doing complex Math calculations. After years of wait, CSS now has enough Math functions supported, particularly mod()…

57

Atkinson Dithering (2021)

When the Macintosh was released in 1984, it featured a square-pixeled black-and-white display at a crisp 72 dots per inch. The 512x342 resolution might seem less than impressive today, but for the time it was a pleasantly high-resolution consumer-grade computer. Among other things, the monospaced Monaco 9pt bitmap…