Today, a post written by my granny. Enjoy.
dear internet
i am granny yuai and i am 84 today as far as u know.
i got the ios 18 on my iphone and the video swipy bar in the photos app is no good.
on the ios 17 it had a long swipy bar for long videos but now it’s always the same size.
so now when i watch a 4-hour video of my great great great grandkids i touch it and it goes like 5 minutes not 5 seconds.
i wish they would keep the good things.
love
granny yuai
How can you let people easily select multiple items on a touchscreen?
It’d be nice to not need to tap or swipe over each item, and remember, no Shift or Command keys.
I can’t believe we still don’t have a convention for this, seventeen years after the iPhone.
SongPocket is a music player inspired by record crates.
It’s got reorderable albums. Group related releases, or put your favorites on top.
And super fun expandable tracklists!
It’s free on the App Store.
SongPocket is the best damn music viewer I know of. I made it for myself.
You can’t unsee reordering. How come you can reorder your to-dos, but not your albums? Your collection feels so personal when you can arrange it just so.
Artwork goes edge-to-edge because phones are tiny compared to vinyls. You don’t even need to play an album to see it at full size.
And the play confirmation prevents accidental interruptions. It makes other apps feel like hot coals.
But most importantly …
I wanted to try this for years.
In Tog on Interface, Tog designs a picker for selecting one or more options, but not none.
Think languages or time zones: you need one; you can have more; you can’t have none.
We actually don’t have a dedicated component for this, even today. We use checkboxes for multiple selection, and disable continuing when none are selected.
But what if?
What can you learn from a frog in a well?
There’s a fable. It’s a rambling mess, features a hypocritical turtle, and boils down to “you don’t know what you don’t know.”
At the end of this post, I’ll tell a better fable.
My life improved when I decided to expect nothing in return.
Get used to it: you’ll die, and the universe will forget you.
But it’s okay. Yell into the void. Shine a little brighter. Spread what you want to see.
Do great things anyway.
Nobody cares, but I believe in you.
(Plus, then it’s nice when something does happen.)
A frog in a well
Hears no thanks for ribbiting
Yet still sings for us
Hare was the best guitarist in the land. Tortoise was a mediocre composer.
But Tortoise did something special: they published their sheet music, hoping others could outdo them—and they did.
Hare fans covered Tortoise songs better than the originals. Hare could play them hopping on one foot.
As you know, the world changed after Pig’s legendary First Flight.
There was something in the air that summer, and we got the impossible collaboration: Hare performed Tortoise songs. Bird sang, Firefly played a light show, and they all danced on a stage Beaver built.
Today, nobody remembers Tortoise’s music or Hare’s music. But everybody remembers Tortoise and Hare together.
Wait, you can do that with BASIC line numbers?
To add a line in between line 10 and 20, I just have to pick a number between 10 and 20, like 15. And then I type my line.
I thought they were just for GOTOs.
There’s more:
I wasn’t happy with line 15 and I wanted it to be different. I could just type in a new line number 15.
That blew my whippersnapper mind.
The trick is, there’s no files and no compiling. There’s no “editor”!
You simply write into the computer’s memory, and tell it to run, from the moment you turn it on.
Even on my TI-83 calculator, the program editor is a separate mode. But on an Apple II, it’s the default environment.
Defaults matter; they express a product’s purpose.
That’s what inspired a generation about what computers should be.
Hence this complaint:
Every step between turning on the computer and running your program loses 30% of the students.
Imagine having to log in to your guitar and create a music document before you could start strumming.
A popular misconception is that good design offers multiple ways to do the same action.
That’s redundancy; the opposite is monotony—having exactly one way to do some action.
Monotony sounds dull, but is actually a profoundly clarifying guideline. I first heard about it from Jef Raskin—yes, the Macintosh guy.
Let’s analyze some examples.
iOS’s Journal app has a delightfully short feature set:
Unfortunately, it lets you bookmark, edit, or delete an entry in 4 ways:
Years ago, I thanked an Airbnb host for having a Twin XL mattress so my feet didn’t hang off the edge.
“Oh, I actually like when my feet hang off the edge.”
Every night since then, I’ve intentionally hung my feet off the edge of my mattress.
