blog.jim-nielsen.com — The Blandness of Systematic Rules vs. The Delight of Localized Sensitivity
Marcin Wichary brings attention to this lovely dialog in ClarisWorks from 1997: He quips: this breaks the rule of button copy being fully comprehensible...
blog.jim-nielsen.com — Continuous, Continuous, Continuous
Jason Gorman writes about the word “continuous” and its place in making software. We think of making software in stages (and we often assign roles to...
blog.jim-nielsen.com — Code as a Tool of Process
Steve Krouse wrote a piece that has me nodding along: Programming, like writing, is an activity, where one iteratively sharpens what they're doing as they do...
blog.jim-nielsen.com — More Details Than You Probably Wanted to Know About Recent Updates to My Notes Site
I shipped some updates to my notes site. Nothing huge. Just small stuff. But what is big stuff except a bunch of small stuff combined? So small stuff is...
blog.jim-nielsen.com — Re: People Are Not Friction
Dave Rupert puts words to the feeling in the air: the unspoken promise of AI is that you can automate away all the tasks and people who stand in your way....
blog.jim-nielsen.com — You Might Debate It — If You Could See It
Imagine I’m the design leader at your org and I present the following guidelines I want us to adopt as a team for doing design work: Typography: Use...
blog.jim-nielsen.com — Food, Software, and Trade-offs
Greg Knauss has my attention with a food analogy in his article “Lose Myself”: A Ding Dong from a factory is not the same thing as a gâteau au chocolat et...
blog.jim-nielsen.com — Two of My Favorite Things Together at Last: Pies and Subdomains
I like pie. And I’ve learned that if I want a pie done right, I gotta do it myself. Somewhere along my pilgrimage to pie perfection, I began taking a photo...
blog.jim-nielsen.com — w0rdz aRe 1mpoRtAnt
The other day I was looking at the team billing section of an AI product. They had a widget labeled “Usage leaderboard”. For whatever reason, that phrase at...
blog.jim-nielsen.com — Book Notes: “Blood In The Machine” by Brian Merchant
For my future self, these are a few of my notes from this book. A take from one historian on the Luddite movement: If workmen disliked certain machines, it...
blog.jim-nielsen.com — Computers and the Internet: A Two-Edged Sword
Dave Rupert articulated something in “Priority of idle hands” that’s been growing in my subconscious for years: I had a small, intrusive realization the...
blog.jim-nielsen.com — Making Icon Sets Easy With Web Origami
Over the years, I’ve used different icon sets on my blog. Right now I use Heroicons. The recommended way to use them is to copy/paste the source from the...
blog.jim-nielsen.com — How AI Labs Proliferate
SITUATION: there are 14 competing AI labs. “We can’t trust any of these people with super-intelligence. We need to build it ourselves to ensure it’s done...
blog.jim-nielsen.com — A Few Rambling Observations on Care
In this new AI world, “taste” is the thing everyone claims is the new supreme skill. But I think “care” is the one I want to see in the products I buy. Can...
blog.jim-nielsen.com — Unresponsive Buttons on My Fastest Hardware Ever
This is one of those small things that drives me nuts. Why? I don’t know. I think it has something to do with the fact that I have a computer that is faster...
blog.jim-nielsen.com — A Brief History of App Icons From Apple’s Creator Studio
I recently updated my collection of macOS icons to include Apple’s new “Creator Studio” family of icons. Doing this — in tandem with seeing funny things like...
blog.jim-nielsen.com — Study Finds Obvious Truth Everybody Knows
Researchers at Anthropic published their findings around how AI assistance impacts the formation of coding skills: We found that using AI assistance led to a...
blog.jim-nielsen.com — Saying “No” In an Age of Abundance
You’ve probably heard this famous quote from Steve Jobs about saying ‘no’: People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But...
blog.jim-nielsen.com — The Browser’s Little White Lies
So I’m making a thing and I want it to be styled different if the link’s been visited. Rather than build something myself in JavaScript, I figure I’ll just...
blog.jim-nielsen.com — The Don’t “Contact Us” Page
Nic Chan comes out as the whistleblower on how many “Contact Us” pages are made (spoiler: they’re designed to keep us from contacting anyone). A “fuck off...