LMNT

This could’ve easily been 12 blog posts, but I opted for one that comprehensively captures how I feel about design on Apple platforms right now. The Pendulum Swing There was immediate criticism of iOS 7’s visual design. Concerns mounted pretty quickly about both style and accessibility. Some people remarked, “It’s only the beta,” implying significant change during the beta release phase was not ju...

Remember The Good Place ? The point system for individual decisions lives rent free in my head. You can’t adhere to this concept too strictly. There’s a long list of decisions that lead to the decision you actually get to make. One of the examples from the show was making a salad, but the tomato you bought was grown in pesticide-rich farmland, farmed by underpaid workers, shipped from Mexico to In...

Well, it’s finally here, the dystopian dream team. Jony Ive and Sam Altman hitched their carts together to create god knows what. While some people are “excited” or “intrigued,” I am frankly “disgusted.” In an intro video with special thanks to the Coppola family and Café Zoetrope for the location, and Harry Gregson-Williams for letting them borrow The Martian score, the two gush about the city of...

Masa Louie, what does “time” mean when ordering? Me What? Masa Like, “One time cappuccino, one time latte, one time special morning set…” Me …What in the world? “Time”? Who said this? Are you sure they said “time”? Where were they from? Masa I don’t know. But… ヨーロッパ style. Me Hold on. Let me think about this. two minutes later Me OK. I understand. In German, people order things using “einmal”...

I was roaming the underground shopping area outside Tokyo Station, and walked past a miniature Don Quixote, a discount shop. The normal size one is almost intolerable, so I never ever go there. As I walked by, I saw an orange bag with a Reese’s logo on it, and I finally understood what Peter Arnell was on about with the gravitational pull of Pepsi , because my body involuntarily shifted into the s...

[Download the video.] Yes, someone in the government is breaking the law, and yes, that other politician is being a hypocrite, and yes again, that one over there is clearly a nazi. It’s all anybody can see. We’re past the point of calling it out. There’s no one left to convince. They’re openly doing it now because there are no consequences. After pointing it out for the thousandth time, they’re no...

There’s a lot to take away from Humane’s story, but first, I want to share something I said on Twitter in July 2022, a full year before Humane revealed their product, the Ai Pin: me I can’t imagine that product being successful. Which makes me wonder— is the whole idea for Humane to patent any technologies it develops in the hopes of licensing those technologies to big companies? Maybe the product...

Modern cartography should not be determined via political pressure. If we all can’t agree on that, we really should. That’s the basis of why it was so cowardly for both Google and Apple to rename the Gulf of Mexico in their maps. As far as I know, there is no law in the United States that compels any private company to draw or label their maps according to what that country considers its official...

Where’s the line that can’t be crossed? Surely there’s something so vile, so intolerable, so universal in its horror that there’s no other choice but to stop and shut everything down. Something where a hashtag would be insulting, where a march or protest would be insufficient. Something that necessitates an absolute refusal to comply, withholding all work and diverting all focus to rioting, proper...

Bumble, 4:50 PM Julia Everyone here wants to get married and have 2.5 kids. me TELL ME ABOUT IT In Japan, there’s a constant reminder from the government—by way of media amplifying it—that the population is in decline, that birth rates are dropping, and that the aging population will have no younger generation paying enough into social insurance to support them. Japan is a collectivist society, so...

café staff Do you like Harry Potter ? me No. Zero percent. café staff Oh. Why? me JK Rowling is an asshole. Louie opens Google Translate She has waged a crusade against transgender people for no reason whatsoever. It’s completely unforgivable, and her words about transgender people made me lose every love I once had for Harry Potter . There’s been discussion over separating art from the artist for...

Ever since my very first website, I’ve had a donate button. And over the years, some people have been very generous and I’m very appreciative of that. I’m no stranger to talking about money. It’s part of my job . For most of my career, I’ve been a contractor, specializing in helping indie developers and companies create app icons and icon systems . And that means writing, negotiating, and signing...

John Gruber , to Siri Who won Super Bowl 13? I understand that American football—and by extension, the Super Bowl—is a popular subject and that this seems like a simple question, however, I refuse to believe this kind of question represents how most people use or expect to use Siri, aside from testing its limits for the sole purpose of journalism specific to critiquing Siri. John Gruber , to Siri...

Tinder, 9:02 PM me Do you think there are limitations to love? な No. me Do you think love is limited to one partner? な Yes. To me, yes. When it comes to family—parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, nephews—presumably you’re allowed to love them all. You can love as many friends as you’d like, no problem. The amount of people you can love is limitless, unless—of course—...

Gunpei Yokoi, a designer of the original Game Boy , described his philosophy as “lateral thinking with withered technology.” Instead of focusing on the newest, shiniest, and often most-expensive components, Nintendo focused on maximizing the potential of more mature and cheaper technology. Despite backlit color displays being available at the time, Nintendo opted for a four-shade monochrome displa...

I saw a few posts and headlines that made me do a double-take. Not because they were particularly shocking, but because they are incredibly avoidable. Ghost is a recently-popular (but actually more than a decade old) blogging platform. People have been moving from Substack (nazis) and Wordpress (bozos) to Ghost . A couple weeks ago, Ghost announced they’re introducing native support for custom fon...

As Mark Zuckerberg changes content moderation policies at Meta, I wanted to re-read my post from last year . me The necessity around content moderation is based on the extended reach provided by platforms. Even the companies that claim to care about decentralization—for some reason—still make space for trending content, universal search, and unrestricted replies . These features do not support dec...

You may have seen Mark Zuckerberg’s five-minute video about how Facebook is doing literal U-turns on many of their content moderation policies. If you didn’t watch it, I guess you could, but you might just come away so upset and disheartened by how a man who initially built a website to rate the attractiveness of women at Harvard could become so culturally powerful at a global level. I have used s...

Dan Counsell Can we please have the macOS X Lion UI back? 😍 Yes, I would also like that. I would welcome any standard UI that gives us back some tools we lost. There’s a refined clarity to this version of Aqua. It evolved gracefully to this point, where every element was distinctly different and yet cohesive. Consider the search field alone. Now, search fields have the same appearance of every ot...

I don’t understand the value of AI summaries compared to traditional truncation. While some headlines are indeed long, summarizing them will always remove context the original publisher thought was necessary. (The same is true for personal messages, but that’s not what this is about.) Headlines are already shortened versions of entire articles. It serves seemingly no purpose at all to summarize th...

I don’t like how the viability of Star Wars is under constant threat from people who Star Wars can never appease. Some fans—primarily men—have gatekept Star Wars for too long. They like Star Wars, but not Return of the Jedi . They like Star Wars, but not the Special Edition . They like Star Wars, but not the prequels. They like Star Wars, but not the sequels. They like Star Wars, but not the anima...

My tolerance for the vast majority of the web is so small now. It nearly completely eroded over the last decade. My trust, patience, and willingness to put up with the absolute hostility of modern websites is at an all-time low. Just about every website and every app has seemingly given up on the goal of being actually good. Maybe designers don’t have the power they once held, ceding it to busines...

A lot of yearly online recaps focus on the consumption and engagement we’ve had in a year, like what music we listened to. But I want to highlight what I’ve done this year, because I’m really, really proud of it. 2024 was the first full calendar year I’ve lived completely in Japan . I didn’t travel outside the country, and for the first time in a long time, I didn’t have an itch to travel anywhere...

In my entire life, I’m sure I only needed to read one post about a lost remote control. After that, they all seem the same. The “unpopular opinions” that resonate with thousands of people are actually popular opinions. Does anyone gain anything from social media posts complaining about gasoline prices or traffic? I don’t think so. Almost two decades ago, when microblogging gained its initial popul...

There’s this thing that Eddy Cue said during a meeting when I worked at Apple that I keep meaning to write about. I can’t reliably quote him, but it was something like this: The iTunes Music Store doesn’t just compete with CDs, and apps don’t just compete with other apps. Everything competes with everything . This thought has lingered with me for over ten years. And it’s not just money. Our most v...