Experience Director. Product Guy. Sports Dork.
Take The Verge’s Color Quiz to test your color recognition skills and see if you can identify the hues of the logos of various tech brands. I did pretty terrible and only got 3 out of 8 right. The most interesting bit is post quiz when they give some background of the company logos and how they changed over time.
My Tweetbot subscription ended so I “received fewer issues than anticipated”? Issues?
Did Apple copy & paste this email from the old Newsstand days?
I actually thought my sub was already expired otherwise I would have opted against the refund, but I’m looking forward to giving the Tapbots team a lot more than $.36 for the fantastic Ivory over the next few years.
As a person who has been knee deep in financial services software for the last 5 years, why didn’t I think of this?
Tax Heaven 3000 is a visual novel dating sim briefly available on Steam (& later pulled) that actually ends with a 1040 filled out you can submit to the IRS: (The Polygon link is SFW, but any clicks beyond that are at your own risk. Mostly jk.)
The “manifesto” posted on the direct Tax Heaven 3000 site has some real biting (and accurate) commentary in it so be sure to check it out as well:
“TurboTax, per its own internal documents, is built on the “Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt” that ordinary people have about their taxes. Against this, we pit free software instead built on parasocial desire for intimacy and benign horniness!”
I’m not sure I totally agree with them that parasocial desire and horniness are always benign, but it sure is funny and an accurate description of the tax prep software industry.
Spotify is apparently redesigning to make the app more like TikTok with autoplaying fullscreen video/audio.
This design is what happens when you design based off trying to guess what Wall Street wants instead of what your users want and need. Been wanting to switch the family to Apple Music (via Apple One) and this looks like it’ll be the final push to get me to do so.
We’ve been having the conversation regularly at the day job recently about how much time and effort we should be investing in dark theme component variants, and Brad Frost coincidentally just linked to a great article from CommandBar exploring that same question.
An Event Apart is shutting down: aneventapart.com
AEA Austin in 2012 was one of the first big design industry conferences where I didn’t feel like a complete impostor. At least not for the entire time. Ha. I was making plans to attend An Event Apart in DC in 2020 when everything shut down.
The great new iPhone app Sticker Drop makes iOS 16’s new seemingly mostly pointless ability to tap and hold to grab the subject of any photo into a killer feature. The app lets you take that isolated image and use it as a fun iMessage sticker to use in any conversation.
UX Magazine has a good overview that I found helpful of best practices for designing autosuggest experiences. Includes helpful examples and puts vocabulary around things like scoping, autocomplete vs autosuggest, and types of suggestions themselves.
The Houston Chronicle has a gallery of vintage photos of Schlitterbahn that really bring back memories of pretty much every moment of my childhood summers growing up. These look like they’re mostly from the 80s so some stuff changed by my era, but really crazy how vivid these make my memories.
EmuDeck is an install package for the Steam Deck that helps set up all the emulators, folders, and configurations you’ll need to get started playing retro games on the device. Run the package and then all you have to do is copy your own ROMs to the created folders.