I’m sad IKEA is abandoning Verdana
My favorite font is Verdana, because it’s aggressively readable.
Some of its notable traits:
Hello, word golf
I have a new writing style: word golf.
Why? Skimmability—I respect your time.
(Also, it’s nice on small screens.)
I started enjoying this on Mastodon (say hi!), even though that’s technically character golf. But I find that fewer words skims better—less visual jumping.
Here’s an example.
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good-enough.
My rewrite?
Sometimes, imperfect is okay.
Nicer, huh?
Am I overthinking it? Always.
But does it add up? Probably.
And is it fun? Yah.
Don’t talk this way—but do perhaps write this way. Always optimize for your medium.
Yup, I’m always overoptimizing something. Perfectionist here.
But worse than overoptimizing? Being unsure what to optimize.
Hence why I’ve blogged so rarely. Should I optimize detail? Accuracy? Interestingness? Now, I’m prioritizing skimmability.
Yes, the order of your priorities matters, and no, I’m not sure here. But hell, editing time matters too.
Anyway, now that I know what to overoptimize, I’ll be blogging more. Stay tuned.
(This post: 167 words)
Songpocket design: the app icon and name
(I recommend reading Waiting to ask for permission first.)
Neil Sardesai drew Songpocket’s icon. Thanks, Neil!
I’m about to brag extensively about how great this icon is. Blame Neil.
Songpocket design: waiting to ask for permission
(I recommend reading Introducing Songpocket first.)
One of my favorite features of Songpocket is something it doesn’t do: immediately demand access to your Music library the first time you open it.
Introducing Songpocket
Have you ever kept a physical music collection? It has this neat feature called “you can organize it however you want.”
But now, think about your digital music collection. It’s locked in place by the automatic grouping and sorting in your music app.
Great UIs are magic carpets for the mind
The other day, I had a moment that reminded me why I love UI design.
I was editing some metadata in Apple Music on my Mac: things like fixing the artist and composer, and the punctuation, like replacing straight quotes with curly quotes, and triple periods with proper ellipses. I appreciate those details.
In short, Apple Music is unusably glitchy. I was fighting a new bug almost every five seconds. Apple should be ashamed of this level of carelessness.
So I switched to Meta, which is a third-party metadata editor that I’d previously picked out and bought, but still hadn’t explored completely.
Why the Korean keyboard layout is brilliant
Five hundred years ago, the Korean writing system was specifically designed to be easy to learn. Similar sounds are written with similar characters, and related with consistent patterns. Some characters are actually pictures of the way your mouth pronounces them. Seriously, check out this video:
Many years later, the Korean keyboard layout seems to have been designed according to the same philosophy.
