Shortform

Wide blue yonder

Posted on January 19, 2025

This is neat. Someone’s building a image-focused app for Bluesky. It’s not intended to be an #Instagram clone, but you can see some resemblances.

Folks on #Mastodon and #Pixelfed might have noticed that Pixelfed has been getting some attention recently. I’ve been on Pixelfed for a little while, but for most of the time I was on there, I didn’t see a lot of adoption. That’s changing, especially as Pixelfed finally released an iOS app. Pixelfed is ActivityPub-based, so it was already possible to use Pixelfed via fediverse apps like Tusker, but a native app is the first thing potential users will look for. I’d been using the beta version on Test Flight; it’s not bad.

I would love to see more diversity in photo-sharing services. I always thought it was a shame that Flickr’s fortunes sunk the way they did.

(Glass is worth considering also.)

The Dock

Posted on January 5, 2025

25 years ago today, Steve Jobs revealed the new face of macOS: Aqua.

I didn’t see that demo, but I remember the moment I first saw Aqua. My dad showed me some screenshots in the New York Times one evening. I couldn’t stop looking at it—I’d never seen anything like it. I’d been fascinated with user interface #design for years at that point, and it hadn’t occurred to me that a computer could look like that. (I was still in high school.)

Former #Apple engineer James Thomson remembers that moment for a different reason: he was responsible for a pretty visible piece of Mac OS X. The Dock was one of the most notable new pieces of UI furniture in Mac OS X, replacing the top-right Finder menu that let you switch between active programs and making it a lot easier to get to your most frequently used apps. If anything melted down when Steve was showing off the Dock, Thomson’s name was on it.

The Aqua screenshots I saw were not from that demo, since I remember the Dock looking like the Dock we know: icons sitting on top of the white pinstriped background, rather than each icon having its own background. (I distinctly remember the magnification effect.) Nevertheless, the pre-Public Beta dock was interesting in its own right. Anyone who’s familiar with NeXTSTEP will recognize the influence.

I always enjoy these little flickers of how things happened behind the curtain, but I’m especially fascinated by the stories behind mundane things—the unglamorous Apple designs you barely think about, the so-fundamental-as-to-be-nearly-invisible elements like the Dock. I hadn’t known who designed the Dock (Bas Ording, who’s made a few other significant contributions to Apple UI design, such as text selection and the now-ubiquitous rubber-band effect), or that the Dock was codenamed Überbar, or that it was prototyped in Macromedia Director. I wish there was something like folklore.org for contemporary Apple products.

Squidpatterns

Posted on January 4, 2025

Nice Work

A collection of colored pixel-art patterns, some abstract and some showing flowers.

Back in the day—in this case, the early ’00s—there was a guy who did these incredibly ornate #pixelart patterns and just gave them away. That was it. That was the site.

I’ve been trying to remember the name of this site for what feels like years. It was called something unusual, and I finally, after some strategically-minded googling, located it: squidfingers.com, by Travis Beckham. Of course it’s different now. But this being the internet, someone archived it, and you can see his remarkable work here.

Something about the whole thing feels very #old-web for some reason. I don’t know. I’m sure designers still do this. I just associate Squidfingers-type projects with the earlier, more experimental web.

A green pattern showing pixelated green flowers.

A pixelated pattern showing a black background with dark gray interlinked roses.

A pixelated abstract pattern of blue leaflike designs with gold curly elements.

A pixelated abstract pattern of blue stripes with green and gold ornaments.

File over app

Posted on December 27, 2024

Steph Ango, on Mastodon:

The accounting tool Bench shut down with no warning 3 days before the end of the year. They had raised $110m in venture capital.

The app is no longer accessible. There will be a way to export your data, but it’s not available yet.

File over app is not just for individuals.

File over app is why I use Obsidian, iA Writer, and (sometimes) AnyType. If my data isn’t sitting on my hard drive in a format I can read, it’s not mine. While I have to use cloud-based services for work, like Slack and Google Docs, I don’t entirely trust them.

I think the Web 2.0 era, despite at least one early cautionary tale, made us entirely too comfortable storing our lives on other peoples’ hard drives. I’d like to see that mindset reversed. Tools like Obsidian—and the larger shift towards more open, decentralized social media technology—feels like a step in the right direction.

Your favorite movie is vertical now

Posted on December 26, 2024

Hey, Watch This

A friend recently shared this video from Kendra Gaylord, describing how your favorite movie is vertical now, courtesy of #AI —and what is lost in the process:

In movies, every time something is filmed, it’s memorializing a lot: the actors, the location, the way we talk and write and joke. Even though it’s fiction, it’s still a document, and if you mess with that document too much, it doesn’t represent all of those things anymore.

One of the most perverse revelations here is that the AI-generated version felt more realistic to people simply by virtue of being vertical; the same aspect ratio in which we experience social media videos. Our window to reality is portrait-shaped.

minidisc.pics

Posted on December 16, 2024

Nice Work

A grid of six minidisc cover designs. They are colorful, and have interesting graphics: a white and black geometric pattern, a red pixel-art version of the Mona Lisa, yellow and green polka dots, etc.

Matt Sephton shared something pretty cool: someone named asivery built a site devoted to the MiniDisc, showcasing all the different #MiniDisc packaging designs (and players) from the early ’90s through 2013 or so. Photos taken by Dan Marker-Moore.

When I think of ’90s–00s packaging and industrial design, the first thing that comes to mind is the bright, translucent colors that everyone started using after the #iMac came out in 1998. Reviewing the collection here, it’s interesting to note the presence of a lot of translucent Bondi blue several years before Apple made that color ubiquitous.

I rarely use physical media anymore (does anyone?) so it’s hard to compare, say, a CD case design from 2002 with a contemporary one. Nevertheless, I’ve had a sense that industrial #design has been getting more austere—i.e. less interesting—for a while now: curves, color, and translucency giving way to boxes, grayscale, and shiny surfaces.

minidisc.pics is a cool reminder that there was a time when tech products didn’t just look sleek and powerful, they looked fun.

Into Eternity

Posted on December 7, 2024

Hey, Watch This

Michael Madsen’s #documentary Into Eternity takes a look at the Onkalo long-term nuclear waste facility, located on the west coast of Finland. Onkalo—“hiding place”—is designed to last for at least 100,000 years; an ambitious proposition, considering that the oldest man-made structures on Earth are less than 10,000 old.

Ensuring structural integrity for tens of thousands of years—or, as one official points out, just the next hundred—is no small requirement, but the designers also have to consider one of the most challenging #design problems in the world: how to communicate with unknown civilizations with whom we may have very little in common. What if, thousands of years from now, someone stumbles on Onkalo and doesn’t realize the danger? Imagine a 19th-century archaeological expedition encountering nuclear waste buried by ancient Egyptians.

A bit on the artsy side, but still, a fascinating—and often beautiful—look at where some of the worst stuff on earth is kept away.

Keep it personal

Posted on November 17, 2024

I think one of the most important features that #Mastodon has and #Bluesky doesn’t is the ability to follow someone and see their posts, but hide third-party content they’re reposting. It might seem small, but it’s the number one issue that discourages me from following people on Bluesky. I want to subscribe to someone’s work without signing up for a torrent of memes and political stuff.

You have this level of control on Mastodon. You don’t on Bluesky.

Vote banner

Posted on November 1, 2024

I designed this banner for Vassar a couple of years ago. Still proud of it.

A blue banner with the text 'Vote' on it in uppercase white and red letters, with three white stars on both sides.

Collective Action

Posted on October 29, 2024

Andy Baio:

Nilay Patel frames The Verge’s endorsement of Kamala Harris around collective action problems: issues that require curbing the selfish behavior of individuals/companies for a greater good. Climate change, vaccines, school shootings, income inequality, tech/AI harms.

Curbing the selfish behavior of individuals/groups for a greater good is the underpinning of every human civilization there ever has been or will be. If you aren’t doing that, you don’t have a civilization.

Conservatives have always grappled with the relationship between regulation and civilization, to an extent that I’ve often wondered how different the Never Trump and Only Trump factions really were. The jaw-dropping number of high-level GOP folks endorsing Harris suggest that to some, at least, that connection is starting to become clear.