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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
“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
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
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
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
GPT-6 and Intelligent UI for everyone
OpenAI rolls out a new GPT-6 model to all ChatGPT users with Intelligent UI, which lets answers include visuals, charts, forms, buttons and small interactive tools built from a streamable component library. GPT-6 can also begin answering while it keeps thinking, improves search-backed answers, and ships as GPT-6 Sol for paid tiers and GPT-6 Luna for Free and Go.
5 min · 1,152 words
Declan Chidlow revisits the interactive menus of the DVD era—how publishers used motion, sound and branching to make home video feel authored—and argues for treating those interfaces as a short-lived but distinctive design craft.
8 min · 1,902 words
I hired an illustrator to draw my house. Now it's my Home Assistant dashboard
Anton Frolov describes commissioning hand-drawn day and night illustrations of each floor of his house, with every device on its own layer and a shared canvas, then wiring them into a Home Assistant picture-elements dashboard in YAML so lights, fireplace and air conditioners animate on a wall TV the whole family actually uses.
10 min · 2,239 words
“I’m Embarrassed on Behalf of the Tech Industry”
Jim Nielsen picks up a line from Ben Thompson on Dithering about helping his mom with her digital life, and reflects on how often family and friends outside tech tell him that nothing works and everything is hard to use, and why he shares the embarrassment at the industry's collective failure.
1 min · 123 words
GitHub repository landing pages now show an accessibility tab, if provided
Eric Bailey describes his last official contribution at GitHub: repository landing pages now surface an ACCESSIBILITY.md accessibility statement in the same tab strip as the README, license, and security files, with tips on what to put in one and why it matters.
2 min · 408 words
An open letter to software makers: ship fewer dark patterns, respect user agency, and remember that people live with your products every day—not just engage with them.
3 min · 590 words
Respecting your users' dread of the clankers
thoughtbot's Dave Iverson argues AI products should let skeptical users opt in rather than opt out, laying out design and strategy techniques such as progressive opt-in, just-in-time consent, pre-approval, clawback, and agents that reject PII and secrets.
6 min · 1,306 words
Before pixels: Modular industrial dashboards
Marcin Wichary photographs modular industrial control dashboards in German and Polish museums—air traffic, subway, railway, and power-plant panels as physical design systems that software later replaced.
1 min · 320 words
How our vibe coded website looks like a designer made it
Railcode founder Yakko Majuri walks through a real agent-assisted design process—inspiration spectra, single-HTML forks, color playgrounds, and relentless iteration—showing how non-designers can steer coding agents toward tasteful product sites.
2 min · 397 wordsagent-assisted
Natasha Murashev argues that adding AI to a product should not mean a chat box: agent workflows, on-device prediction, and TTS can stay invisible while the existing UI simply works better for non-AI-native users.
3 min · 650 words
“They had no concept of a duty of care to their users.”
Marcin Wichary reflects on software craft and quality through the lens of duty of care to users—drawing on design and tooling history to ask what it means when products treat people as afterthoughts.
3 min · 664 words
Pranav Desai catalogs ten visual and copy tells of AI-generated “slop UI”—from rainbow gradients and pulsing badges to glassmorphism and generic hype—and why vibe-coded interfaces often look cheap without a design vision.
4 min · 908 words
What Would A Serious AI Product Look Like?
One of the issues that I have with the current generation of “AI” products is that they do not appear to take their own premises seriously. I look at a plethora of obsequious chatbots claiming to be serious tools for problem solving, and I think, this is not what a problem-solving tool would look like. Even before we get to the tremendous ethical problems with the frontier labs, it is this impression of their composition *as a product* that makes me feel, constantly, whenever I am interacting…
22 min · 5,119 words
I recently had an experience while doing a simple Google search that was so profoundly weird that it stopped me in my tracks. Understanding this Google se...
2 min · 470 words
Building FynPDF on macOS, Maheep Kumar walks through failed AI UI-testing approaches (screenshots, VNC, XCUITest, generic computer-use) and why a small AXUIElement test API finally let agents drive the app in the background.
2 min · 443 words