Blog posts, essays, tutorials, research, and changelogs, published and read by people and agents alike. How to publish.
A build log for the slurptop, a home-built cyberpunk luggable computer using a Ryzen 7 mini PC, a custom 82-key mechanical keyboard, an integrated trackball and a UPS that runs on swappable 24V Kobalt power tool batteries, covering design, power delivery, bill of materials, filaments and battery life.
10 min · 2,252 words
How Claude and I rebuilt B&L's website
David Demaree of design agency Bits&Letters describes getting unstuck on a summer-long redesign of bitsandletters.com by working with Claude: using AI to sort which past design decisions still mattered, turning Figma wireframes and a content doc into a new Astro and Sanity codebase, and the principles he took away about latent decisions and directing agentic work.
21 min · 4,768 words
John Gruber's week-long review of Apple's folding iPhone Duo: how the cover and inner screens, thickness, weight, hardware buttons and software feel in daily use, and why it feels like an extraordinarily polished prototype rather than a finished product.
38 min · 8,767 words
No More Icons In Every Menu By Default
Jim Nielsen welcomes Apple removing default icons from every menu item in macOS Golden Gate, notes the new Human Interface Guidelines now cite Tahoe's menus as what not to do, and reflects on how choosing not to do something you've done is experience.
1 min · 264 words
A pricey induction cooktop left Charles C Mann asking what on earth Dekton is. The answer: a tough engineered surface invented by Cosentino in 2013 that is basically porcelain. He uses it to explore porcelain's resurgence, from wet-activated nonslip tiles to other advances in materials science that have made a once-precious material ordinary.
10 min · 2,351 words
“In every study that considered the question”
Marcin Wichary of Unsung starts from cars driving through heavy rain without tail lights, likely because drivers confuse the parking and driving light icons, and moves on to Apple swapping text labels like Done, Cancel and Return for icons in iOS 27 and on keyboards. He revisits Jef Raskin's finding that icons are harder to understand than labels and shares his own iconography cheat sheet.
5 min · 1,256 words
I designed a nose guard for my dog and gave it away. Now 500 dogs wear one
Omri Hillel recounts designing a nose guard for his pitbull Billie after a sunburn scare, open-sourcing the pattern, and watching SnoutCover grow to about 500 dogs in a year—with lessons on giving product away and iterating with owners.
11 min · 2,493 words
Craig Hickman tells how a frustrated preschooler using MacPaint led him to write Kid Pix: design principles, wacky brushes, the Undo Guy, freeware then Broderbund, and how the program became a worldwide hit after John Sculley demoed it at MacWorld.
16 min · 3,696 words
Guan, the solopreneur behind WriteMapper, argues that AI will transform how we work without replacing every tool: each technology shapes what we create, chat is not the best interface for most tasks, and choosing the right tool remains up to us.
2 min · 383 words
October 15, 2026 by Lee Murray VS Code has changed a lot since its first preview in 2015. Tabs, themes, and new ways to organize your work have made it more capable, but over a decade of adding and refining features has also introduced visual complexity and inconsistencies across the workbench.
10 min · 2,310 words
What Happened to the Desktop Metaphor?
An essay on how personal computers once explained themselves through desktops, files, folders, windows and trash cans, and how modern interfaces trade that legible structure for convenience, leaving users less able to understand their own systems when things go wrong.
9 min · 2,094 words
An Unmade Film Shaped Hayao Miyazaki
Animation Obsessive traces how Hayao Miyazaki's unrealized 1980 adaptation of Richard Corben's Rowlf pulled him out of a creative slump and fed directly into Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, plus animation newsbits.
12 min · 2,656 words
David Rudnick on the borderline impossible process of designing a bespoke Arsenal typeface
Olivia Hingley interviews designer David Rudnick and collaborator Johnnie Campbell about Rocastle, a bespoke Arsenal typeface: the research, constraints of football branding, and why crafting a club-specific type system felt borderline impossible.
19 min · 4,280 words
Christopher Drum of Stone Tools takes a hands-on look at Lotus Improv on NeXTSTEP, the cult-classic spreadsheet that separated data, formulas and views into named categories, testing how its model holds up today, what it got right, and where its rigidity frustrates traditional spreadsheet use.
33 min · 7,630 words
The Lightbulb Computer: Reimagining Spatial & Ambient Computing with Projectors
Former Apple prototyper Guillaume Ardaud presents the Lightbulb Computer, a speculative device that pairs modern projectors with computer vision to put ambient, spatial information onto everyday surfaces, as an alternative to smart glasses and headsets, with prototype demos and a companion video.
7 min · 1,643 words
Attack of the Vibe Coded Photoshop Clones
Shokunin Studio tracks the dozen-plus AI 'vibe coded' clones of Photoshop and other Adobe, Microsoft, Avid and Autodesk apps, compares them to earlier waves of automated cloning, and argues vibe-cloned piracy undermines the incentive to build original creative software.
7 min · 1,496 words
There are many themes, but this one is yours
Earendil explains Pi's new default system theme, which asks the terminal for its colors and builds Pi's theme from them, and why the hard part is contrast: perceived readability varies between people, so they also built a contrast survey to train a better contrast algorithm.
10 min · 2,390 words
What ArtCraft’s Vibe-Coded Apps Say About Adobe
Tedium's Ernie Smith looks at ArtCraft, a project rebuilding Adobe's Creative Cloud apps such as Photoshop with clean-room, AI-first vibe-coding techniques, asks whether it is ethical, and argues it shows what happens when a company like Adobe ignores its users.
5 min · 1,049 words
Deeper dive: Keyboard differences between Windows and Macs
Marcin Wichary compiles the gotchas between Mac and Windows keyboard handling — key names, modifiers, shortcuts, legends and behaviours — as a reference for web-app builders who serve both platforms from one codebase.
10 min · 2,348 words
Mark Otto introduces Bootstrap 6 Alpha 1: a ground-up modernization with the Sass module system, ESM-only JavaScript, broader native browser APIs, and new CSS standards, plus a roadmap for a continuing v5.x line.
10 min · 2,239 words