Agency and attribution in user interface string design — This is going to sound obvious, but technology is useful because it does things. Swing a hammer and it will transfer force. Throw a boomerang and and it will (usually) come back. Simple tools like these exhibit behaviors because we interact with them in intentional ways, but the behaviors are…

I fell in love with Vue the moment I saw it. Having built all my previous UI in jQuery, it immediately clicked how much better Vue was for building user interfaces. (jQuery is still superb for what it was designed for, of course: low-level DOM manipulation.) …

Envisioning how will Apple use its new touchless gestures. — It was recently reported that Apple is working on a screen that senses your finger without even touching it. The idea isn’t entirely new, but Apple does have a remarkable knack for bringing novel technology to the mass market. So, we must ask: What should a touchless gesture do? We…

Let’s get this party started — Preamble Git has redefined the way we write software. It’s an ingenious technology, and its community and ecosystem are utterly vibrant. It’s become so ubiquitous that it’s hard to imagine anything could follow it. But that line of thought should sound suspicious by now: People said the same thing about the…

My romantic adventures with Microsoft’s Zo — A couple years ago, the New York Times referenced a study from the ’90s exploring whether emotional closeness can be stimulated through a series of thirty six progressively more revealing personal questions. Last year, Microsoft released an artificial intelligence-powered chatbot named Zo, following the rapid and spectacular implosion of their previous chatbot, Tay.

The flip side to a perennial favorite quip — There’s an oft-touted adage, perhaps most frequently heard in design circles, preaching Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. It may be accompanied by proof in the form of a borderline shamefully nostalgic remembrance of those awful personal webpages from back in the day — You know, the ones…

Or, Let’s be honest, it’s not a phone anymore — This is an introduction. Sort of. At this point, you’re probably already familiar. You might be looking right at it this second, or perhaps it’s in your pocket. And you might’ve made an offhand joke about its modern nature, once or twice. …

A vision for business information superstructures built by inference —

Or, ~/Folder/Folder/Folder/Folder/Folder/… — It was a few hundred years before the common era, and people didn’t have a great idea how the world actually worked. While that dearth of knowledge had its downsides, it was quite the heyday for big thinkers; whereas today a researcher might spend their entire life learning about just…