I spotted this kind of a keyboard shortcut pattern the other day. Here it is in Photoshop:
Here it is in DevonThink:
And here in Linear:
Those “ordinal” keyboard shortcuts feel nice and orderly, and look so elegant, too. But beware! The moment you’ll want to introduce a new option, or even reorder the ones you have, you’ll be in trouble: Either you preserve people’s motor memories, and then the elegant ordering immediately goes to hell – or you will have to change an existing shortcut to something new, and frustrate your users. Might be best to be really confident in your selection being forever locked before attempting this.
But then there’s a similar treatment here in Linear:
Or here in Raycast (when you hold ⌘):
Or here in Ghostty:
Those three look like the same idea, but they worry me less.
Why? Because these shortcuts more clearly point to a position rather than a thing. Here, the mechanics of the UI themselves convey that people, commands, or tabs are going to be moving around. Of course, some will get used to “1 means assigning to Marcin,” or “⌘3 means the Unsung tab” – the same way we get used to “second item on the Recent list” or “at the top of the third search result page,” if they start repeating as a pattern – but at least it feels to me that the interface here is more honest about what it can promise.
I often think about this, by the way: Not what the interface conveys in the moment, but what it promises in the long run.
From Marton Barcza at TechAltar, a good 12-minute video analyzing what went wrong with the famed Live Tiles that Microsoft was pushing throughout most of the 2010s:
Now, among Windows Phone fans the pervasive opinion is that Live Tiles have failed because Microsoft did a poor job with them, which I think is at least partially true – after all, even many key Microsoft apps like Skype had broken Live Tiles half the time, the Windows 10 start menu was filled by Microsoft with Live Tiles that were clearly just animated ads rather than showing you something actually useful, and the company of course never built out any of their advanced interactive concepts either.
But while all of that might be true, the fact that every major company has walked away from this idea and nobody else has picked it up since, means that there probably are more fundamental problems with this idea. And I can think of three distinct ones:
user experience,
form factors,
and horizontal integration.
Barcza goes on to talk about some specific interactions and problems, and arrives at the conclusion that Live Tiles ended up at this unpleasant intersection where they’re tried to be icons, widgets, and notifications all at once, not doing a particularly great job at either task. That, and there were also challenges with the design primarily being mobile-first, and struggling surviving a jump to a large screen. (Live Tiles were abandoned in 2017, at which point desktop Windows reverted back to what it was before, and the mobile/tablet lines were altogether disbanded.)
What I found interesting in watching this today is that it feels Apple has made some similar mistakes in their Liquid Glass approach and wider platform unification desires (see: macOS Settings). Both these and Live Tiles attempted to create A System Of Systems, and both ended up occasionally feeling like they awkwardly crowbarred some wider concepts into places where they didn’t truly belong.
If it helps with your further research, I understand Live Tiles were part of a bigger UI effort called Metro and started in earnest with Windows Phone.
Sopwith is a 1984 videogame made by David L. Clark for the original, seminal IBM PC model 5150. It sports the distinctive 4-color CGA palette and an equally distinctive PC speaker soundtrack.
It’s also one of the oldest videogames still in active development, and I was surprised how enthralled I was learning about it.
(First of all, you can play Sopwith in a browser. Choose “single player” and then “novice” first for the game to tell you about its unusual keyboard control scheme.)
The current maintainer of the effort is Simon Howard. He wrote about Sopwith’s interesting history; I appreciate this kind of approachable and caring preservation of obscure titles. The history is worth a read.
From that, I learned a fascinating factoid. The game was intended as a demo for networking hardware, and the original author didn’t realize the game was “in circulation” for many years:
Intended as a trade-show demo, it’s unclear how Sopwith escaped to the general public. David L. Clark didn’t even discover until around 2000 that it had “gotten out”. Little did he know, Sopwith had been circulating for years in collections of early games for the IBM PC. Only a couple of years after the first version was released, ads were appearing in magazines like PC Magazine advertising Sopwith for sale as part of collections of games for the IBM PC
The modern edition started by Howard is called SDL Sopwith (SDL being a cross-platform graphics library):
SDL Sopwith is directly derived from the source code to the original DOS versions, and still includes changelog comments that date all the way back to 1984.
What I particularly liked about the contemporary Sopwith is its guiding document/philosophy page, also worth checking out in full. Here are some choice principles:
Sopwith has a long history that deserves to be honored and preserved. By default, the game should always play like the original DOS version. That means the gameplay in particular should be the same, without any significant differences. Someone who has just discovered the project should find it to be a delightfully accurate recreation of the game they may have played when they were younger. […]
Some new features can be enabled by default, as long as they are subtle, unintrusive, carefully considered and can be turned off. An example is the medals feature.
The game will never try to be “something it’s not”. This means that it will always have four color CGA graphics, PC speaker sound effects and a low resolution display. It will never add (for example) hi-res sprites or 3D models, digital sound effects or MP3 music. The goal is to be “a great old game” rather than “a mediocre modern game”.
New features should be fun and recognize the comical aspects of the game. Features should be carefully considered before being incorporated, not just added arbitrarily and thoughtlessly.
There is something in all this that I feel a lot of software could learn from – not just vintage games. I appreciated Howard being thoughtful about growing Sopwith without forgetting its roots, but also with understanding that some things have changed since 1984. You could imagine remixing “The goal is to be a great old game rather than a mediocre modern game” to something like:
Better be a great focused app than a mediocre sprawling app.
Thank you to everyone who answered the call for good software updates from last week. I received so many nominations that the list below is severely narrowed down, but I appreciated every response!
I grouped the answers in sections I saw emerge organically, I included links to apps, and did some light editing for clarity. (You can always explore more answers on Mastodon and Bluesky.)
I hope you find this inspiring in some way – I know I did! – or at least enjoyable.
Something I asked for
People shared examples of improvements they particularly asked for, improvements that meant something for people close to them, or even simply seeing people given credit for ideas:
I’m a space educator and bring a mobile planetarium in schools. I use a piece of open source software called Gaia Sky. It is developed by only one developer, and I seem to be one of only a handful of people in the issue queue requesting updates. Always a prompt and incredible reply from the developer.
I filed a request: “In my shows, I tell the audience that the rings of Saturn are made of bits of ice, rock, and dust. Then when I fly through, it shows a mostly 2D ring system. Has [making the rings use particles instead] been considered before?” I made the issue on February 12, and by May 11 had a Saturn ring system with thousands of little rocks and pebbles running smoothly in my planetarium dome. Kids loved it.
Earlier this year I contacted Fantastical’s Flexibits requesting that hiding an event was accessible through the menu bar, not only in the contextual menu. Few weeks later, they emailed me to let me know the feature was coming in the following release.
The dev behind OpenStreet Browser listened to my feedback and added a filter item to a more logical category.
The recent SailfishOS update brought back the weather app and implemented Bluetooth for the Android support. Both of those are things my dad asked for, so I was quite happy! :)
The [social network] Pachli developer is amazing, the care he puts on everything, and mentioning every people that was involved on new ideas/fixes/improvements/translations... I do not remember others doing it. It’s great.
Every Pachli update is a prove of something great happened/is happening... Increases the hope world count a little.
I enjoyed using Easy CSV Editor and JSON Editor by VDT Labs in 2020-ish. Unfortunately, JSON Editor was macOS-only at the time while Easy CSV Editor was also available on iOS. So I contacted the guy behind VDT Labs, and asked whether he planned publishing an iOS version of JSON Editor anytime soon.
He got back to me immediately, said he didn’t have any plans, but liked the idea. He asked for my opinion on a few decisions he’d have to make, then published an iOS app literally weeks later. I love using his software. […] When you published I trust in TextEdit, his stuff came to mind immediately despite getting the occasional feature here and there. It’s nothing flashy, but the apps are simply reliable and haven’t changed much at all.
Apps that are updated respectfully, without changing too many things
On that last note…
The last AntennaPod UI update looked great, but didn’t force me to re-learn how it works. It has remained stable from a UX standpoint for as long as I have been using it.
I use the Infuse app primarily on the Apple TV (but also on the Mac and iPad occasionally) and I’m constantly impressed at their singular commitment to deliver on making their app useful for its users in all sorts of small thoughtful ways on an ongoing basis. Most recently it was supporting Plex and Jellyfin-style folder/file naming conventions for movie extras.
The only upgrade that always pleases me is a major Debian release. actually I’m happy because it’s been a rock for more than 20 years for me. I hate how everything is perpetually changing in IT nowadays. Debian doesn’t. The only change I fondly remember is when zfs integration got easier.
Updates that showed developers cared about more groups of people than just mainstream
Pachli’s update to include pronouns of the posters in the timestream.
OCR on macOC and iOS expanded into Swedish a while back. Super useful, especially on OS level, so all apps can use it.
Not sure what version, but the recent macOS that added made-for iPhone hearing aid support made a huge difference in my work life.
TL; DR: Apple established a standard for “made for iPhone” hearing aids that pair directly to iPhones quite a few years ago, but it’s only recently (in the post M1 era) where Macs have supported the same protocol. It means that calls and other audio from my work Mac go directly to my aids, without needing a clunky intermediary device worn around the neck. Since I need to wear the aids anyway, it means seamless access to audio. It’s just such a nice quality of life improvement.
An update that made an app better for me was the recent addition of flood warnings to Watch Duty. I have a mountain cabin in California but my main home is now in coastal North Carolina. I installed, and pay for, Watch Duty for warnings on California fires, but I can now also use it for warnings about North Carolina flooding, which can happen during tropical storms.
Updates that felt genuinely focused on helping users
The grocery list/recipe keeper/meal planner app AnyList. They just added “leftovers” tags and recipe queues to a recent update and my wife’s over the moon. It meshes perfectly with how her brain operates.
It has not been made fully public, but I am playing with the preview release of [font editor] Glyphs. And it’s great: Huge number of small fixes all around, but the whole UI has been revamped to match the macOS latest. Running variable fonts for testing is so much easier with an axes slider. Lots of editing tweaks that make things much easier. Genuinely nice and useful stuff, they pay attention and listen.
Every upgrade to Halide has made me happy. I can’t think of a specific change but every upgrade seems like it does better what a camera app should do: have stuff where your finger needs to go without thinking about it. Anything that helps my finger hit the right place at the right moment without thinking it’s a win. I think a camera app is the ultimate example of cognitive load mattering.
I’ve been building different things with [web framework] Web Origami and the most recent 0.7.0 beta release allowed me to do a lot of things I couldn’t before.
The creator is an absolute pleasure to work with. He listens to folks using the tool. Every update is gold and makes meaningful improvements based on how people are actually using it.
[Window manager] Niri consistently has extremely well thought and well implemented out features. Many of them are things that I hadn’t even considered wanting from a window manager that I now can’t live without.
Every update I have ever received for the Android application Kanji Study has been delightful. Chase Colburn does a great job with steadily improving the app and adding great new features. There are a bunch of little UI flourishes in it that I think you’d like. The kind of thing that comes from a tight loop between developer and users, smoothing off the edges that provide friction.
Something that comes to mind is the way it implements history. If I clicked on one of the characters in the Kanji listing for 美人, it would take me to the page for that kanji, and it’s easy to end up down a short rabbit hole if you’re the kind of person who enjoys leafing through a dictionary semi-randomly. But there’s a good history functionality that makes it a breeze to get back, and you can jump to an arbitrary point in that history instead of mashing “back” until you get to where you want to be. That’s not award-winning design, but it’s good design.
Updates to core stuff that never asks for limelight
Flighty: I don’t think I’ve seen a team work so hard to get the core use of their app nailed perfectly. No enshittification, no horrific UI changes. Their most recent update just further enhances what they’re great at.
[Painting app] Krita’s latest version has on screen text editing and it’s a very welcome addition to an already great tool!
I don’t know how recent it was, but the one for macOS where you can cut and paste text from images was a real pleasure to encounter.
When [3D modeler] FreeCad hit 1.0 – lots of small improvements in the sketching workbench made an area of the app you spend lots of time in so much nicer.
I’m thinking of the Transit trip planning app, which I love! There’s a bug fix for a problem where you would be en route, then looking at a different app on your phone, then come back to find out that the Transit had been killed in the background, and you had to restart your trip planning. That was a definite problem and i’m excited to hear that it’s been fixed!
I was also reading about the big design update they put out last year, which i continue to enjoy and get a lot of use out of. :)
[Text editor] Zed once had “improved font rendering on Linux” in the release notes and the text really looked better after the update.
I really want to share the Fantastical Calendar Mirroring feature. I have happily paid for Fantastical for years. And over that time I have paid for some calendar mirroring tools, none of which I liked for the money. Now I get a streamlined mirroring feature in the app I already love. It was a total surprise too!
I have used Fantastical for years now and, when I had to switch to using a Windows desktop at work last spring, I downloaded the released-but-still-under-development Fantastical for Windows app. I was accustomed to changing the visible calendar group on macOS using Ctrl+1 and would often try it out of habit, even though it wasn’t implemented on the Windows version yet. In fact, I would even mentally convert the macOS Ctrl+1 command to Windows-speak and type Alt+1. Then one day earlier this year, Alt+1 actually changed my calendar group. Much to my surprise, I had again typed the shortcut, despite it doing absolutely nothing many times before, and found that Flexibits had not only added a keyboard shortcut for that setting, they had added the keyboard shortcut I knew to expect coming from macOS.
When did iOS add document scanning with OCR? iOS 17? 18? Much better to use a phone instead of a dedicated scanner for periodic receipt scanning, plus the document then syncs to a Mac.
[Text editor] BBEdit 16 has some nice quality-of-life improvements, like per-project colour settings, which might help me to avoid accidentally making changes to the wrong version of a project, something I’ve done more than once.
This is a sad, sad commentary on my life choices in general, but i happen to be really glad that a recent Outlook for Mac update gained the ability to import PST files. [Legal software] eDiscovery still exports in PST format, so until this feature launched you had another step (or more, depending on your method) in getting exported mail back into a mailbox that lives on a Mac.
App makers working hard on developing trust in ongoing updates
The Playdate game console. They do such a great job adding joy and functionality to the platform with each software update. I continue to love the music and thoughtful interactions throughout, but more specifically the recent-ish update they added to the game browser, adding in folders and improving access to games on the system.
Cities: Skylines II has been on an incredible upward trajectory ever since Paradox gave the game to Iceflake. Optimization, features, just overall feel of the game have all improved since they took over at the start of the year. It’s a great redemption arc for a game that many people want to be great, but fell short in its first few years.
[RSS reader] NetNewsWire: every update does something genuinely useful like action log in one of the latest updates, so I can see what’s the problem if feed update takes suspiciously long time.
Wrike Desktop for Windows: very much a rolling release model, they do a monthly update, and I’m just happy when my work applications don’t break or get a bunch of BS added that I didn’t need (just didn’t want to use enshittification twice in one email). The most recent update was minor, some field admin changes and some further detailed reporting. Can’t beat that.
The release notes I’m always excited for are Zen Browser. They’ve been cranking through a roadmap of user-focused features, and their design is opinionated about it. Not always right, mind, but with strong convictions. Recently, improvements around tab tiling and the addition of “boosts” – color scheme and element zapping without an extension.
Stripe continually improves. it’s the SaaS vendor I use and am most pleased by. Every few months they add a new feature and I usually react “ah, that’s good” and “wow, their documentation is so good I can decide if I want to implement this and implementation will be so easy”
The team at [map software] QGIS consistently makes the app better with each release. Over the years I’ve made my peace with a dorky OSS interface and I appreciate that this isn’t being continually reinvented. Meanwhile, they’re keeping up with all the changes and movements in geospatial tech and ensuring that updates to key packages make their way in.
Let’s hear it for game devs who do free content+QoL updates for years after release. No Man’s Sky is the poster child here, but I’m constantly amazed by the number of indies who substantially add to the game experience long after they’ve been paid. (And yes, I know this helps sell the game + DLCs). I think Criterion’s Burnout Paradise was the first to really surprise me this way. IIRC they didn’t add much content for free (maybe a couple of game modes?), but they overhauled the UI completely.
Yeah, Pachli and [browser] Vivaldi came to my mind too. These are the ones that I’m not afraid to update, and while they were great already, somehow they are still getting better and better.
the Typeface app for MacOS continues to be a spark of joy for me. Recent updates have added a nice font pairings tool and thoughtful UI updates. I always look forward to new updates from this dev.
[Personal finance app] YNAB! This one has been the most consistent over the past few years for me. It feels like every single update just made it so much better. They added a summary home screen, removed some fluff, and added even more reflection features which is really convenient for a budget app.
App makers that feel like they’re going against the current bad trends
For me, every [photo gallery] Ente update so far was a significant improvement and going in the direction I’d like things to go. Recently, I was positively surprised by the new offline gallery feature to use Ente without account from March this year – refreshingly different from where most projects are heading.
NetNewsWire 7 required macOS Tahoe when it came out, but was in a later update made compatible with previous macOS, Sequoia.
[Personal database] Obsidian — one change that was fun.
The folks at FernCRM made their platform AI-optional. They basically will turn off all the AI features if you don’t want them. And for the folks who use those features a tiny bit, they offer selective metering so you don’t have to pay for everything if you don’t use everything.
I literally canceled a premium subscription to a software I liked because it was mandatory and weirdly intrusive. People appreciate choices!
Pretty much any [social network server] GoToSocial update falls into that category for me. [Software framework] Forgejo updates do as well.
I found that projects with a strong anti-AI policy generally deliver delightful updates. I wonder if there’s a correlation. (I really don’t, there is.)
The excellent [podcast app] Pocket Casts just launched generated chapters in podcasts. They’re automatically added with (whisper it) AI, but that doesn’t matter. They just work and are surprisingly useful and delightful to use. This isn’t an “AI feature” - it’s a feature that just happens to have been made possible because of AI.
I find myself looking at the chapters of almost every podcast I listen to now as a sort of preview and taster and navigation menu. Helps me decide if I want to commit to the whole episode or just skip to a particular section. Wonderful stuff. I didn’t realise it would be such a valuable addition until it was added and I started using it. I’ve attached a screenshot from a recent episode of Blair Braverman’s brilliant What To Carry, What To Burn pod (which I can also recommend).
Updates that are presented well and fun to explore
We chatted about good release notes before, and here are some more good updates – ones designed that exude some amount of healthy pride, and ones that people simply enjoy reading.
The first thing that makes me happy is how pretty the notes look. They’re not a boring list of changes.
Soulver 4’s release notes were great: an overview of the new features followed by examples / documentation of how to use them.
I also enjoy reading This Week in Plasma for [Linux distribution] KDE, even if I don’t use it much and it’s not release notes strictly speaking, but the fact they explain what and why they did is so cool.
Apps that don’t pressure people to update
The most delightful part of the [calculator app] Soulver update is that they’re still doing major paid versions (not subscription).
Soulver 2 and 3 never stopped working. (I never got to use Soulver 1, so can’t speak to that.) In fact, the email that announced v4 said: “Please note, there’s no pressure to upgrade if you’re happy staying with Soulver 3, which you can continue to download from here.”
Ever since I started using Blender a few years back, every update has been solid, well documented, and focused on improvements to real things its users care about. Whenever I check the release notes it’s like: “new geometry nodes! more cycles renderer optimizations! more compositor features!” Even if this post jinxes it and the next release has all kinds of AI garbage grafted onto it, it will also never force me to update.
Particular updates that stuck in my memory
I really liked this section:
You asked for recent, but about 30 years ago I got a BIOS upgrade which fixed a bug in the HD driver and made it quicker. That was sweet.
I was just thinking the other day about how the MKII version of Roland’s MC-500 sequencer software is still one of the most joyous software updates I can ever recall. This was in like 1987 or something.
The details are somewhat lost in the mists of time but I just remember getting a whole boatload of new functionality, some of which I didn’t even know I needed, and yet it all fitted perfectly within the conventions established by v1 so there was nothing new to learn in terms of the UI. Amazing stuff for what was essentially a numerical keypad and a few function keys.
The MkII software came out when they released MkII hardware – but was completely compatible with my MkI. That was the big joy about it, getting all the great new features without having to obsolete/upgrade my hardware. (I think it even came with a sticker to put over the logo.) Can you imagine that?!
I hope you’ll forgive me breaking the rules a little bit, but one of my favourites ever was Super Mario Brothers 3.
Let’s pretend as we all should that Super Mario Brothers 2 never existed and look at SMB3 as a sequel that fixed so many things from SMB:
You could now go backwards in a level in case you missed something
You could replay a level you’ve already cleared to explore and find new things
You had a place to put power-ups for later
You could freaking fly
Perhaps that’s the dream – to release an update so good that the users think about forever.
If you want to record the screen from your iPhone on your Mac, open the QuickTime Player app but ignore New Screen Recording, and click on New Movie Recording instead.
This instruction is a fever dream of three weird things in sequence:
What on earth is “QuickTime”?
I am recording with a player?
Why can’t I choose the option that describes exactly what I want to do?
It’s interesting to me to think how we got here:
QuickTime is a 1990s brand, an offshoot of QuickDraw. Instead of QuickAnimate or QuickPlay, Apple called it QuickTime because it felt cute: time is what separates static images from video. The branding was much more prominent in the 1990s and 2000s, but mostly fell out of use – searching for “quicktime” in system settings today, for example, yields zero results.
Long ago, the Player was the only free, consumer-facing part of QuickTime, so it needed special branding. You could purchase QuickTime Pro – you would even get aggressive ad banners for it inside Mac OS! – and its encoding and saving capabilities would then be sprinkled across the entire system.
“New Movie Recording” originally offered recording from external video cameras (like iSight, another cute name). “New Screen Recording” was added later, for recording from internal screens. My guess is that technically, architecturally, or both, it was easier to treat external screens (like iPhone or Apple TV) as external video cameras since the UI and affordances matched them more closely. So that’s why screen recording from external devices ended up under “New Movie Recording.”
As a UX historian, this is fun and fascinating! I love tracing back that kind of stuff and learning how certain strange things came to be.
As a user… not so much.
“If you want to record the screen from your iPhone on your Mac, open the QuickTime Player app but ignore New Screen Recording, and click on New Movie Recording instead.”
This feels thrice arbitrary, closer to a magical incantation than a computer command, requiring you to hold a bunch of counterintuitive things in your head, or look them up every time. “Wait, what was the strange name?“ “Yeah, it’s called a player, but that’s ok.” “Hmm, I remember something about not choosing the obvious command.“
I have this internal rule that a flow or a space in the UI should have at most one weird thing. I can’t prove it to you mathematically, and I would be the first to find exceptions to my own rule. But one weird thing makes me nervous, and two or more weird things in concert raise the hair at the back of my neck. Two weird things is when the “launch blocking” bulb lights up in my head. Work needs to happen to bring the weirdness count back to 1 or 0.
This is one example of what I dragged Apple earlier for: it’s not just speed that matters. It’s noticing this kind of complexity, places where an easy way was chosen, design debt accumulated, and things got simply too weird. Apple allowed three weird things to accumulate here.
(By the way, delightfulweird doesn’t count! But it’s hard for me to imagine anyone defending these three things above as delightful or positive in any way.)
“If you want to record the screen from your iPhone on your Mac, open the QuickTime Player app but ignore New Screen Recording, and click on New Movie Recording instead.”
“If you want to record the screen from your iPhone on your Mac, open the Recorder app and click on New Screen Recording.”
It’s not trivial to get to this or something similar, but it’s also not really hard. You can get rid of weird things, but you need to want it.
I know software updates can be exhausting these days; on top of regular weariness of things changing, there’s contentious stuff like Liquid Glass, or thoughtless AI integrations.
So, I’m curious: What is a recent software update, anywhere, that made you happy? Something that made an app genuinely better for you, or showed a developer listening to users, or was just plain old delightful?
I’d love to learn, and I will summarize the responses next week.
If you want to, you can respond on Mastodon and Bluesky – and see other a few people’s nominations as inspiration – or send me an email. Thank you in advance!
I liked this page I just learned of called Incomplete List of Mistakes in the Design of CSS. It might not mean much to you if you don’t write CSS, but could be fun to check out if you do. Here are some choice quotes:
border-radius should have been corner-radius.
It shouldn’t be !important — that reads to engineers as “not important”. We should have picked another way to write this.
white-space: nowrap should be white-space: no-wrap.
The “caron” should have been called hacek and combining hacek. The term “caron” is suspected by some to be an invention of some early standards body, but it has also been claimed by others to have been in use at Linotype before the days of digital typography. Its true origin may be lost in the mists of time.
These are great because they simply say “this is how we messed up.” They are succinct and candid about problems. More work needs to be done at this point, of course – the CSS list only really contains the “simple,” low-level observations, and I think for both CSS and Unicode fixes cannot simply be made because people and systems rely on the existing behaviour – but the first step is admitting you have a problem, right?
If you’re on the outside, it can be comforting to realize “oh, it wasn’t just me, other people don’t like this, too.” (Scanning bug reports from other users can help in a similar way.) If you’re on the inside, consider making a list like this for a long-standing project. It might do you or your team good!
If you are aware of more documents like these, I’d love if you could send them over.
The software company Panic has a blog, and has had it since 2009. It has a clean, modern aesthetic that looks something like that:
However, something interesting happens as you start going back in time by clicking Older Posts at the bottom – the historical posts are rendered using their original styling:
This isn’t something that happens for free, as with any redesign every piece of content gets ported to a new framework and style by default. So, I gather this was an intentional thing that also required extra effort both to make it work like this to begin with, and to allow the old style to appear nicely within the different confines and technical realities of the new style (you can compare the above screenshot of Firewatch announcement as retrieved today with its original appearance in the late 2015).
I love this effort. I wonder if more places on the web could use that kind of thinking. As an example: what if your social posts or blog posts from long ago came adorned with the same avatar that you used when posting them, even if you updated it many times since?
Here’s a 2002 story from a younger internet, by programmer Trey Harris (link to the original and if you don’t like the classic Usenet formatting – my browser’s reader mode can’t even prettify it! – here’s a nicer-looking format):
“We’re having a problem sending email out of the department.”
“What’s the problem?” I asked.
“We can’t send mail more than 500 miles,” the chairman explained.
I choked on my latte. “Come again?”
“We can’t send mail farther than 500 miles from here,” he repeated. “A little bit more, actually. Call it 520 miles. But no farther.”
It would be easy to assume this is a classic case of pebkac, “problem exists between keyboard and chair,” the derisive term used (supposedly!) by support people, describing naïve public who had a tenuous grasp of technological reality. But the story goes to an unexpected place.
This might be the most widely-shared computer bug story of all time I’ve seen – I just saw a comment from 2008 calling it “oldie but a goodie,“ and it even has an FAQ page that’s actually a really great read. There’s quite a bit of chatter inside about something important to me: the balance between the needs of good storytelling and going deep into technical details:
In the story, I make it sound like it took all of ten minutes from being made aware of the 500-mile email limit and determining a 3 ms light-speed issue. In fact, this took several hours, and quite a bit of detective work. The point is, eventually I came up with that figure, ran units, and gagged on my latte.
You can sense author’s frustration with every nerd trying to “gotcha” him instead of just enjoying the story. Even a younger internet wasn’t without faults.
First of all, correction for part 1 – the “focus mode” wasn’t removed. It was renamed to “quiet mode” and relocated to a different part of the UI, and I failed to spot it there. It’s still slightly perplexing, shiftily capitalized, and I doubt fully effective, but the effort is there:
I also want to warn you there will be no more positive things I say in this post.
Now that I’ve experienced the dialog myself in Photoshop 2026, and a few other dialogs that have been upgraded toward what Adobe calls “modern user interface,” how did it fare?
These are 2025 windows and their 2026 equivalents:
On the surface, it feels like a lateral move. I do not personally find the new design language (Spectrum) attractive, or even particularly “modern.” The gestalt remains off and things are still generally misaligned – they’re just misaligned in net new ways.
But it was digging into the window below that showed all the problems in the still-wet foundations…
…and a lot of them have to do with focus.
1.
The first field is not focused, so you cannot start typing the number after opening this window. You need to immediately move your hand to the mouse.
2.
If you click on any field, the value is not pre-selected, so you cannot start typing a new number then.
Principle: Defaults within fields should be easy to “blow away”
When a user activates a field, the current entry should be auto-selected so that pressing Backspace/Delete or starting to type will eliminate the current entry. Users can click within the field to deselect the whole, dropping the text pointer exactly where the user has clicked. The select-on-entry rule is generally followed today. (Sloppy coding, however, has resulted in the text cursor dropping at various unpredictable locations. )
3.
Clicking on parts of the input field doesn’t bring it into focus even though the hover state promises it. (Discrepancies between hover and focus handling are a horrible new thing I’m starting to see more in recent interfaces.)
4.
Simply backspacing through the field shows a crude error modal and – to add a second injury to the first injury – the dialog removes focus from the field!
5.
Tabbing now goes through “Pixels” menu on the way from Width to Height, making it harder to type width → press Tab → type height → press Enter, in a nice quick keyboard gesture.
I will recognize this is a tricky one, because it exposes a core tension with tabbing: some people use it for comprehensive keyboard access, but others want an accelerator “express train” with only relevant stops. However, macOS already has a “Keyboard navigation” setting for that – you can choose whether tabbing should go through all the controls, or only those you get to type in. Not only does Photoshop ignore that preference, but it’s inconsistent with itself – you can see that you cannot get to Anchor via tabbing anyway!
6.
Clicking on the “relative” checkbox or canvas extension color does not restore focus to last control like it used to.
7–∞.
There are tons of other transgressions. Some are downwind from focus; for example, undoing after moving a slider no longer works, because the ⌘Z keystroke is now swallowed by a UI element that doesn’t know what to do with it. Some are unrelated: Pull-downs are now of the slower kind, pressing ⌥P results in more blinking, and this tooltip below feels so cheap that I’m surprised it’s not a talking point of the current U.S. administration:
I am tired even just noticing all this. (What is that weird clump of pixels on the left of the bottom edge!? Did no one spot it before launch?)
So now what?
I generally avoid such harsh labels on this blog, but: this is awful work.
I’m angry. (Clearly.) We should all be angry in the face of stuff like this. This is how people get fed up with software – because it feels unstable and deteriorates on its own without needing to.
I know I brought up that an existing power user base can be a huge pain in the ass, and I am a decades-old Photoshop power user. But this is different than other examples where the product needs or at least wants to evolve past its core audience or toward a different market. For Photoshop here, nothing I see indicates any change in course or clientele – and yet all of these good moments in UI that used to help me out no longer exist.
Plus, all those transgressions are solved problems. Those issues are not buried in pages of heavily litigated patents, or in seven collective brains of world-class interface designers whose driveways are presently occupied by cash-filled trucks sent over by frontier companies. This isn’t some long lost art that requires archaeologists to decipher. This feels like carelessness and laziness in face of basic UI engineering; in a likely internally-motivated effort to refresh the interface, the team threw an entire nursery worth of babies with the bathwater.
It’s not just about disservice to craft. It’s not even about disrespect for change management, trivialization of institutional memory, and disinvestment in quality assurance. This isn’t only, in Tog’s words above, “sloppy coding.” This is also a failure ofimagination. It’s not that hard to picture people spending 8+ hours a day going through these windows for years if not decades to come, and it’s not hard to add and multiply all of these microfrustrations into numbers that should make one pause. With these many paper cuts, you need to start thinking about establishing a blood bank. How can you expect people to use a professional tool effectively if you throw in so many roadblocks?
In an internally-motivated UI refresh like this, you not only need to meet users where they used to be, you also ideally have to give them more to cover for the pains of change. Sometimes that “more” is better storytelling – here, no one even tried to really sell me on the new interface – but ideally “more” means actual felt improvements. I’m not on the team, but it’s not that hard to imagine some of them:
Change those annoying modals that announce typing errors into something lighter and more modern, like attached tooltips.
Add more comprehensive equation support so e.g. I could type “660*2” like I can in increasingly more and more apps.
Add a bit of memory/stickiness to some options (like Use Legacy in the first window), so I don’t have to keep toggling them over and over again.
I started this post talking about a setting, and there is another setting in Photoshop, buried on the last page – you can turn off this “modern user interface” that feels so underbaked the moment you start actually using it. But is that a real solution to anything? Toggle it on and the existential dread comes back: Am I going to miss out on some good stuff? When is the hammer going to drop? It’s not a tax break, it’s only a tax extension.
Even this view above shows so little care, it would ordinarily deserve its own post.
It’s a fun (as always) watch, but as a UX designer, it’s also interesting to try to figure out what are the underpinnings of the things Staecker lists as strange from today’s perspective.
I believe that “CE/T” (clearing and totaling) coexisting on one key is a nod to professional accounting use of adding machines where you wouldn’t want to accidentally enter something into the record twice – so totaling also automatically resets the value and prevents you from making a mistake.
I also believe the strange [+=] rule is only because the keypad has to look forward at the same time it is looking back: it needs to serve as a universal computer keypad where [+] and [=] are separate key, but it also needs to pretend to be an adding machine where one key served both purposes.
(You can spot that the back of the box just allows you to swap the [+] key to be something else.)
Overall, the video is a fascinating tale of an “in-betweener” product that was stuck not just in the middle of a transition from physical devices into apps, but also at the intersection of calculators and adding machines (once two very different lines of products), themselves trying to learn from each other. It also serves as a great reminder that skeuomorphism is not just about visuals and sounds, but also behaviours: tearing off the tape, details of specific keys, nuances of rounding.
It’s not a thing of the past, either. In my post about determinism I linked to Apple’s recent travails with the deterministic Clear button (part one, two, and three). A few years ago, Apple also changed the built-in iPhone calculator from its “desktop calculator” roots to a more modern model where you get to input the entire equation before you see the result. But that change had bigger consequences; for example the [=] key could no longer repeat an addition. People complained, and Apple added it back – but the change feels incompatible with the new system and potentially confusing:
Elsewhere, the entire iPhone is an in-betweener, as the keypad coming from calculators is incompatible with the keypad coming from phones.
At this point it seems the calculator keypad will win, but transition has been over a century in the making. Staecker’s video is a good reminder how important, but also hard it is when you try to make these transitions happen faster.
A thoughtful 26-minute talk by Imani Joy, the solitary full-time designer on Mastodon, reflecting on her nine months there:
It’s an interesting peek behind the curtain at designing for this particular space, and the many unenviable constraints: lack of data, care for privacy, tension between Mastodon’s power-user early adopters (“they are values-driven, they want control, they’ll tolerate a lot of the clunkiness of the Fediverse”) and “mainstream audience [that] expects polish.”
At some point, design needs to be authoritative, but how do you combine that with wanting the process to be as inclusive as possible? The product itself is a federation of various servers that can exert their own control – so how do you bring it all together under one neat umbrella for the user? (Also a challenge for Android in comparison with iOS.) The mainstream design has certain fashion-y tendencies. How to make sure you don’t lose yourself while chasing them, but also not to stay ossified out of fear of making changes? (Wikipedia, Internet Archive, and other similar places look and behave a certain way, after all, and it’s not usually because of lack of talent to “modernize” them.)
The most interesting thing to me was this:
It’s easy to talk in terms of who to optimize for. Things get harder when you start to articulate who you won’t optimize for, what trade-offs you must make in pursuit of your goal, and who you’re going to risk letting down along the way. What the team needed from me more than anything was not the probabilities, not the usability findings, not the story of who we’re making happy. They needed to hear who will choose to disappoint and why. And I told them that building the best experience on Mastodon means that we’ll solve for the extremes, but we won’t center them. And sure, we do risk frustrating some power users who want absolute control over their profiles, but that risk is necessary to optimize the experience also for browsing users.
When we were working at Figma in 2019 shipping an update to text line height algorithms (moving them from the way print does things to the way web does things), I started an internal document called “The new line height and its discontents,” where myself and the team deliberately wrote out who will be most annoyed about the changes, and why. We listed our arguments, workarounds, even “deal sweeteners” (“but look at this other thing that will get better as a result!”), but we also tried very hard to be candid with ourselves. Some people were not going to be happy no matter what we do or say. Do we know precisely who these people are and are we okay with that? I’d recommend that approach for any change-management project, rather than keeping fingers crossed or toxic positivity.
Joy so far worked on quote posts and new profiles, and I appreciated her ending the talk on a note of recognition for these kinds of projects in these kinds of settings:
I know that we’re building something that will continue to be imperfect, but it doesn’t have to be perfect to make a positive difference in the world.
Recently, spelunking in the preferences of Photoshop 2025, I found this extremely curious thing:
To transcribe:
Focus mode limits the appearance of certain optional user interface messages so that you can use Photoshop with fewer interruptions.
With this option enabled:
The Welcome screen will not include “what’s new” feature descriptions
Blue in-product alerts promoting discovery and use of certain features will be suppressed
What’s New will not auto start when Photoshop is launched
The color mode preference will be auto set to “Neutral Color Mode”
The three first options should be self explanatory. Neutral Color Mode is sort of the “graphite” option of Photoshop’s UI where the (already rare?) accented blue elements become white instead.
As much as I’ll always applaud a piece of software working on annoying you less, this is all so very strange. I don’t mean that the last option seems unrelated, and the first and third one kind of mutually exclusive… but just the very idea of shoving it in as an opt-in in the last tab of settings, under “technology previews”, and asking people for feedback feels peculiar to me.
Not to spoil the outcome, but even this “technology preview” is completely gone in the updated Photoshop 2026. I wonder if this is fallout from a mangled launch (even for those few who I imagined turned it on, the option didn’t live up to its promise), but also perhaps a political fight inside Adobe between product and growth teams? I bet we’ll never know.
I do not personally have a grand unified theory of how to explain things or announce features in products because it’s so situational, and I understand that especially Photoshop given its age might be the hardest difficulty level. I’d personally prefer to receive announcements of new features over email so I can read them at my leisure, and with each new thing or change linked to a playground that would allow me to experience it in the best way – but I can’t say with any certainty that this would work for everyone.
But I would expect people on the Photoshop team to have more experience here, and this focus mode approach just feels a bit… naïve to me. My two warm takes: 1. People aren’t generally as frustrated with how features are announced, but with what features are. 2. Why wouldn’t everyone deserve the gift of focus?
One particular thing that stood out to me was a discussion of shame and embarrassment and pride that all come with shipping software. And looking to Apple itself for direction that the company is not really providing, as many of their apps are not using the new Liquid Glass interface – or when they do, they use it in ways that are inconsistent or disappointing.
Some other good themes:
it’s okay not to change something if the alternative is change for the sake of change, a posture Apple’s hardware team feels more comfortable with than Apple’s software team
internal Apple politics and the story of the Control Strip
loved this phrase from Gruber about the macOS’s Tahoe release: “they vandalized it.”
Also, this:
A fair criticism of Apple over the years is that sometimes fixing 50 little misaligned text boxes or divider bars… using your time to do that, is time better spent than adding another user feature.
