MacPaint is a key step in the history of UX (and visual design!) I built a super simple way to use MacPaint 1.0 in workshops and lectures. Try it: juliendorra.com/macintosh/

2-minute pottery in Mac Paint 1.0. Time lapse created using juliendorra.com/macintosh/

in Accelerando (2005) by @cstross.bsky.social at the start the main character is using smart glasses and have the same disconnect with people. He's an early adopter, tech obsessed. It costs him something. Very relevant book. Captures from @mkbhd.com's review of Meta's Ray-ban display

You should care about Kare (because she's the first digital design professional)

Here are three people that are present everyday in your life: Jef Raskin, Bill Atkinson and Bas Ording. They make you move in very specific ways. Do you know why?

Artificial Intelligence programming book from… 1986

What if the atomium was a giant rotating sculpture? Shot with a 1997 camera, animated with a 2025 AI

Black Lava, made with Live Code Lab

AI and video games: using light fast AI models to get impactful results - Combining game's ingredients in detailed monster description => GPT5 Thinking (ok, heavy model) - Monster image gen => Flux Schnell, optimized for speed, <2s generation - Monster video gen => Luma Ray3 draft, fast, 20-30s

Créez le problème pour mieux annoncer la solution 🙃

I built a new generative AI prototype! The goal? Find out how gen AI can expand playful user experiences that have been traditionally limited by fixed rules and pre-created content. What if crafting-based games were much more open ended?

Brussel has a special mix of architecture, and the Sony Mavica FD7 (1997 floppy camera) is particularly adapted to shooting the 70s - 90s buildings there. I especially love the quite tacky neo-neo-classic ones.

AI chatbots: so cheerful and happy to grant your wish in a totally wrong way

The world before containerization (Retable of Saint Nicholas, ≈1479/1505)

I’m sorry but I don’t know a single PhD who you can’t give a whole book or two to read… (yes, it’s about GPT5 still too small input length)

Who's afraid of blown out highlights and color fringing? Not me! The Atomium in Brussel, shot with a Sony Mavica FD5, a 1996 camera that uses diskettes (!) and take 640x480 pixels photos using a video sensor.

The Paris Olympics flame, up again for 3 summers. Shot with a Mavica FD5, a camera that uses diskettes to take 640x480 pixels photos using a video sensor!

In 2013, Mozilla partnered with ZTE to create a phone with a FLOSS OS based on web tech: Firefox OS! You could build native apps using only HTML, CSS, JavaScript. This is a piece of tech history, from a moment many believed there still was a chance at a really open and accessible OS for phones

weird 2025 problems

A new tool that lets its users work 80 times faster? It was released, and it was 46 years ago: VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet, which allowed users to do in 15 minutes what used to take them 20 hours! Did their professions disappear? No.

Early Aqua (10.1 2001) compared to later Aqua (10.7 2010)

Bill Atkinson was one of the most influential interface (dev+UX+UI) designer of all times: if you're using a computer, you're using his inventions everyday, pull-down menus that you can ruffle through (invented over one night… after months of iterations), palette-menu in design tools like Photoshop…

It’s the weekend so here’s generative art at the bouldering gym

Is Google the Apple of generative AI?

Generative art with Louis XIV

Thunderstorms at Jardin du Luxembourg. E-paper generative art that I can carry in my pocket, created with the micropatterns tools I designed (editor and firmware)

Generative Art at the Arboretum

E-paper is still emerging as a platform. What is it good for, beyond book readers and price tags? It's an open tech design question. (tech design is also called full stack design).

micropatterns, from code to e-paper. Now render 10 times faster on the e-paper device. Faster slow art? 😅

I created a completely crazy Memphis Milano inspired design for the Micropatterns web editor… but I added two levels of failsafe in case of visual overdrive!

Handheld Generative Art, at the top of the Eiffel tower! I wanted a way to enjoy generative art outside of the phone or computer screen, so I designed it using an e-paper dev kit 😄

Handheld Generative Art

I debugged by reading the code, like that, without AI, like a psychopath

Real life UX anti-pattern. Defensive design to "fix" self-inflicted "wrong user behavior". This (recent!) bike lane is dangerous, so bikes drive on the sidewalk. Next step was *obviously* to put barriers there. Now it's bad for bikes, cars, pedestrians, wheelchair and stroller users. Lose-lose UX 😱

A4 sheets, barcodes… and the web! Why aren’t designers more focused on designing standards instead of products? Standards (aka protocols, conventions) create huge ecosystems of companies, devices and applications, unlocking incredible value.

"I've been surprised to find that most of the products out there billing themselves as "AI Agents" are not all that agentic. A lot of them are mostly deterministic code, with LLM steps sprinkled in at just the right points to make the experience truly magical." github.com/humanlayer/1...

iPhone 2G and iPhone 3GS on top of an iPhone 16. Designing for the early smartphones was very different than designing today, and their success is hard to really capture without experiencing them. UX history gives designers perspective!

This prototype has never been experienced outside Apple since 2005! Try the Blob Keyboard, Ken Kocienda's first prototype for the original iPhone keyboard. It’s raw UX, it's unfinished, but it was the **first** to really work! juliendorra.github.io/blob-keyboar...

How do you solve a design challenge full of unknown unknowns? Jump back to 2005 and try the Blob Keyboard, @kocienda.bsky.social's first working prototype for the iPhone keyboard, created during a UX crisis.

@kocienda.bsky.social I posted it on HN, and there's a bunch of nerds all over the word thanking me, that's quite fun 😅 news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4359... I tried to answer and dispel some myths / misinterpretations in the thread too, hopefully I get it right!

I knew the US was an outlier amongst OECD countries on homicide, maternal and infant death, longevity, but road fatalities specifically is something that I missed. Again, GDP per inhabitant is not telling the whole story of wealth in a country, especially not how this wealth is distributed

@kocienda.bsky.social Hi! I’m teaching a tech design history class here in Paris where your keyboard is one of the key innovation stories. I’m making the class more hands-on with props, demos. Crazy idea, I want to build a Blob Keyboard simulator 😅 so they can *feel* the design iterations

The interaction is the product.

Is there a Claude MCP for chatGPT? I’d rather have an AI write the prompt for my AI app. It’s agents all the way down 🤪

"We find that the time taken by human experts is strongly predictive of model success on a given task: current models have almost 100% success rate on tasks taking humans less than 4 minutes, but succeed <10% of the time on tasks taking more than around 4 hours." metr.org/blog/2025-03...

Text is an incredible powerful technology, made even more powerful by computing. Visual builders for apps or workflows suffer, trying to hide text ie. code and data. Text always comes back!

AI image modes are confusing. So for Esquisse I picked: Paint over, Contour and Inspiration— instead of: Image-to-image, Controlnet, IP Adapter. The original terms are known in the AI users community, but not outside, and they are opaque.

En workshop IA générative avec des alternants Data : leur premier réflexe, utiliser Esquisse pour brainstormer leur idée d'app IA … qu'ils vont ensuite créer avec Esquisse !

Generate code, generate code problems! Bolt users are seeking help to debug their code on the discord! Lot of other interesting infos by Stackblitz's founder Eric Simons in this podcast. "Bolt's Eric Simons on Enabling Everyone to Generate Websites with AI" open.spotify.com/episode/4YBY...

Just a cute robot to help you today