Here’s another, shorter post on interaction design, this time looking at @panic.com’s Nova. It’s about how some buttons don’t exist to be clicked. pending.design/buttons-not-...

Corrupt government menacing whistleblowers: Snitches get stitches Functional government touting universal healthcare: Even snitches get stitches

A woman on the street just now, placing her hand on her child's head lovingly: "and so a byte has eight bits"

My developer friends were baffled; my non-developer mom got along just fine. Today's article: when designing for approachability excludes experienced users. pending.design/mom-only-git-c...

Still reading Pogue's Apple history book, and it's full of interesting new tidbits. Like how "Designed by Apple in California" was first used in the 80s, when Apple was contracting another company to do design (?!). Or that Macworld magazine was created *by Apple* to make the Mac seem more legit!

Just added tags to pending.design/ articles! No list pages yet; the tags are just here to make it easy to look at just dev or design articles, depending on taste.

Small change but nice: gutter checkboxes in inactive windows are now gray. Should have fixed this years ago! indieapps.space/@Retcon/11656...

Here's Retcon 1.6.1, with an assortment of fixes, but also a few new features and improvements. Update now for a nicer time!

🤦 Sometimes when building a Retcon release, there's some uncommitted comments in the code. I don't remove these since they have no effect on the built output. …but they're probably the reason I sometimes have crash report stack traces that symbolicate nonsensically. What a goof!

Whoa: just found a crashing bug in Retcon, that I wrote *four years* ago. It's easy to trigger, too: just ⌘↓ a commit that's right above the very first commit in the history. (it's an array indexing bug: the commit has no parent now, so the lookup fails. these days I use `safeIndex:` everywhere.)

love the amazon reviews for this brand of potato chips that used to only be sold in prison

A short video look at cherry picking in @retcon.app! It’s the sort of thing that’s fun to see in action. #macOS #git

The definition of insanity is doing a thing just once, and thinking the result could never change

Like a toddler who just learned the word "no", my Mac has been running around pointing at every app I launch, warning me that they're all Intel-only. (they're not)

doing things to help the people who live near you is a very good way to abate your stress about the world at large. there is very little you can do to prevent the horrors far away, but there is so much you can do to care for your neighbors

"How should we name our paid support tier? Pro? Premium? Expert?" "Sounds perfect."

Happy to finally, finally release this update! Been working on-and-off on copy and paste for more than a year. Plus, I think it’s a really cool way of solving cherry picking; both completely unique among Git clients, AFAICT, and so natural it looks completely obvious. Very Retcon.

Time Machine's APFS snapshots tend to lock up a lot of space. On my Mac, it's regularly a hundred gigs! I used to regularly delete them to reclaim some space, but just today I created a launchd task that runs `tmutil deletelocalsnapshots /` every night. That's one less chore!

Retcon's website being mentioned on Unsung is a good feeling! The whole blog is a fantastic showcase of human-computer interaction design. unsung.aresluna.org/the-cheat...

'A simple (perfect) life' - my spring landscape is finally finished! An apple orchard in bloom, old railway, sheep with their lambs and an allotment being prepared for growing :) Zoom in to see all the other tiny details too... I think this might be my favourite aerial embroidery I've ever done!

Oh gosh, yes. Video decoders for games is one hell of a complex topic. For a start: patents are everywhere and not free. If you want to decode a 4K video with bare normal framerate (even on modern hardware), you can't do it without paying a patent to someone. You just can't. (cont.)

In the middle of a large interactive rebase, you realize the commit list you arranged wasn't quite right. Maybe a commit is missing, or misplaced, or something else. Where usually you'd have to start over, Retcon lets you course-correct on the fly: your history remains fully editable, always.

Back in 2014, the iPhone's panorama feature could still use some work

Just fixed a typo in the undo cheatsheet on Retcon's website. Ironically, if you do *not* use Retcon and instead favor the CLI, then that page is one of the best "how to undo anything in Git" guides on the Web. Do share it with all your Terminal-loving friends: retcon.app/#undo-ch#undoeet

Just learned about Cooklang, a language for recipes. Compatible apps can do the usual smart things (e.g. scale quantities), but the raw text stays human-legible. That means you can put your recipes in Git! There’s also mobile apps, and everything is OSS. Very nice. mas.to/@cooklang

I'd like to launch apps with global keyboard shortcuts; but not single shortcuts, sequences (e.g. ⌘5 followed by ⌘6 could launch Music). Anyone knows a Mac app for that? I currently use Apptivate, but it hasn't been updated for a decade, and is starting to have issues.

Dye's icon changes color whenever you switch an app's theme. The animation is powered by a chain of Core Image filters, mostly to make the color visibly follow hair strands, by using a transition mask. I think most people won't notice the change, making it into a very unsubtle easter egg?

When you lose Internet access, Discord immediately goes completely blank. That is not offline-first design!

The other day I was looking at an Indian place on Apple Maps, and someone had uploaded their CV as a restaurant photo (I blurred their info for the screenshots)

I didn’t know Apple had repair guides now, complete with short videos for many steps. That’s neat! This one is from the Neo trackpad instructions: support.apple.com/en-us/126165

You'd expect Picker to be a straightforward view in SwiftUI; but in Dye, pickers took a baffling amount of coercing to actually look right, and not be absurdly slow. Here's some perplexing code I had to write! pending.design/unreasonable-p...

Dye works great with Radiccio! Dye lets you customize the colors of your Mac apps. Check it out!

Announcing Dye! (no relation) Set a different theme color for each one of your apps: make Finder red, and Photos blue, each one's tint's now up to you. Dye is a free, tiny app, handwritten with care. And it's open-source! lemon.garden/dye/

one of my favorite moments of TNG is when Picard is immediately unable to contain his horse autism

Just stumbled onto Itsycal, a menubar calendaring app. Spend a few minutes on the site and it's obvious how much the author cares, cares about making something nice that people will enjoy. There's such warmth in something like this! Wonderful to see. www.mowglii.com/itsycal/

I've been working on so many different projects at once—Retcon updates, a tiny app, blog posts, more—and really can't wait to publish them all. It seems I work better when frequently switching focus, but then there's the frustration of not having anything to show!

lovely photo of four-toed feet at my local podiatrist's office

The world feels quite precarious right now—and sometimes we forget what it feels like to pursue happiness. @alv9n.com digs into a study that asked more than 10,000 people to share their joy. From personal growth to friends and family, here’s our happiness mapped. pudding.cool/2026/02/happ...

PSA Outer Wilds is 50% off on Steam till Thursday! This is the biggest discount it's ever gotten; usually sales max at 40%. store.steampowered.com/app/753640/O...

On the topic of resizing windows: you can actually enlarge the (exterior) clickable area. Just run this and log out and back in. defaults write -g AppleEdgeResizeExteriorSize 8 (Seems to default to 4. You can revert the change with `defaults delete -g AppleEdgeResizeExteriorSize`)

A high-quality video about some low-quality code. Maybe seeing how a masterpiece like Portal is built on spaghetti code will help cure your perfectionism? Or maybe the video's polish will make it worse. (warning, this fully spoils Portal's ending!) www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ax7Ab...

So, with @eidhof.nl we spent January making Pancake: an app for creating your own blog. Write posts then publish them, all from within the app. It’s both very rough and pretty neat! It’s out as a closed beta, and we have a short video of the one-minute setup process: chris.eidhof.nl/post/buildin...

WORLDWIDE release times for Relooted’s launch tomorrow!

Just had to force-quit Xcode because it was swallowing up memory. After relaunching it, its icon turned to this. I think it's depressed now?

The Apple indie dev community is undergoing an identity crisis. For decades, whatever Apple said was good, was good. People mostly agreed with their ethics, design priorities, way of doing business. Now that all of that has, well, severely degraded, it leaves us in the dark. The north star is gone.

The popup's title: "We Care About Your Privacy" The popup's very first sentence: "We and our 56 partners store and access personal data"

Look, you shouldn't do this. But turns out subscripts can have default values, meaning empty brackets are valid syntax. Why not use this to check types in a way that'll be confusing to everyone?

Trying a small design update to tabs: changing the design of both the "3 changes" and "paused" suffixes. Now they're badges: much clearer, and much more compact, so more info is shown (nice!). But they're also a bit more prominent; does it feel like the dot is nagging you about these  changes?

It's pretty funny reading update notes for apps with unusual purposes. Like this very serious description of the "enhanced gust frequency" in Let It Snow, an app for adding animated snow to your Mac screen.