I’ve done some of my best writing ever in Stickies. Seriously.
Because Stickies lets me…
Meanwhile, file editors force me to do all the opposites. What a distraction from actual meaningful work.
Computers should work the way humans think, not vice versa. Stickies does, so it’s a bicycle for my mind.
The Boy and the Magical Robot, composed by 40mP
This song’s story spoke to me.
Given its title, I guessed it was an anime opening. But then I watched the music video and lyrics.
Three minutes later, I was sobbing.
The lyrics are autobiographical: as a kid, 40mP was too shy to sing in front of others. But then he discovered vocaloid software, and though it didn’t sound perfect, it let him make music. Hence, a vocaloid song about vocaloid software itself.
And that’s why I like computers.
In the ’80s, desktop publishing enabled anyone to write a book. In the ’90s, desktop video-editing enabled anyone to make a movie.
Here, without vocaloid software, this song simply wouldn’t exist, nor would the remakes and even dance choreography based on it.
Computers enabled all this creativity, and that warms my heart.
Check out the lyrics, and the real-life story behind the song—they’re poetic. No other song has inspired me like this, so I must declare this my favorite song ever. 🩵
Songpocket is an immersive viewer for your Apple Music library.
It has two key features:
With these features together, browsing your music feels stunningly intimate. It’s personal and focused. Here’s why.
Most music apps offer separate sections for Artists, Albums, Songs, Genres, and so on. Songpocket has only one browsing mode: Crates.
Crates are simple, freely editable boxes for your albums. They let you…
My favorite font is Verdana, because it’s aggressively readable.
Some of its notable traits:
To elaborate, apertures are the openings to partially enclosed spaces. For comparison, here’s Helvetica:
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)
(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.
One of my early requirements for the icon was “no music note”. I’m sick of music notes because every freaking music app uses them, despite never displaying sheet music.
I had already settled on the name “Songpocket”, so we both had the idea of putting some embroidered “musical symbol” on fabric. That would have fun textures, too. But we couldn’t think of a great symbol. We thought a “play” icon was boring.
(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.
Instead, it only asks you for permission after you tap “Allow Access to Music”.
Don’t you hate when the very first thing an app does is throw a permission alert in your face? Before you even get to see what the app looks lik—
Hey! That’s just a rude first impression. And why would I let you send me notifications when I don’t even know what those notifications will be for yet?
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.
Now, this is peculiar. How come our digital music collections give us less freedom than physical ones?
Hell, even your to-do app probably lets you reorder tasks and move them between lists. Since when is your music collection less personalizable than your to-do list?
Introducing Songpocket, a music player that lets you organize your music manually.
It lets you reorder artists, albums, and songs:
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.
Meta is “Mac-like”. It uses mostly system UI elements, and it follows Mac design conventions. I immediately started working more efficiently in Meta than I could in Apple Music.
But then, Meta gave me two a-ha moments that made my day.
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.
First, the left hand takes all the consonants and the right hand takes all the vowels. You can’t do this with English, but you can with Korean, because it happens to have a similar number of consonants and vowels: 14 of each, not including combinations.