2023-09-26 12:49
Skeuomorphism taken to the extreme rarely works. But it can be fun. Like a turntable interface for playing YouTube music or a rotary telephone dial for number inputs.
For buttons, skeuomorp… Read More
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On web development, interface design, user research, and all the rest. From the founder of Codepip.
2023-05-19 14:10
Can you play videos natively through CarPlay? That is, without jailbreaking your phone or buying expensive hardware. The short answer is, no.
The longer answer is, poorly.
Poorly as in, slic… Read More
2021-03-03 14:17
https://thomaspark.co/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/needledrop.mp4
My latest experiment is Needledrop, a turntable interface for playing music from YouTube. Enjoy chill vibes as you spin a… Read More
2021-02-17 14:26
The Obsession
My family gets competitive with card games. Our latest obsession is Dutch Blitz, a fast-paced game that seems somewhat regional due to the Pennsylvania Dutch influence.
To giv… Read More
2020-09-23 12:39
Chess is a continuously evolving game. Technically. There have been many rule changes, but each one has taken centuries to be introduced and widely adopted.
That might all change though with… Read More
2020-09-16 12:29
If you’re into tools — think hammers and drills — you’re probably familiar with the extremes people go to protect their prized possessions. The most popular… Read More
2020-06-08 13:27
After 65 years at Mad Magazine, comic artist Al Jaffee announced his retirement. Jaffee was best known for his Mad Fold-Ins, where folding the page would reveal a hidden message in the artwo… Read More
2020-05-07 12:11
I’ve made a Chrome browser extension called No Scary Parts. It automatically skips the scary scenes in family movies on Disney+, for the sake of your sensitive… Read More
2019-11-19 13:33
So you want a different language keyboard for your MacBook Pro. And it’s too late to pick that option at checkout.
Apple Support won’t be much help here. They won’t change… Read More
2019-10-02 23:49
At the Overwatch League Grand Finals in Philadelphia, attendees received white wristbands that blink different colors in sync with each other during the event. When the San Francisco Shock w… Read More
2019-09-16 12:31
In the course of developing Campus Arrival, a WordPress site that provides school-specific packing lists, we added a feature to suggest nearby universities. When viewing a school’s che… Read More
2019-09-11 12:21
Recently I’ve been working on The Beautube, a site that integrates video tutorials with details about the products being mentioned in the videos, specifically in the realm of cosmetics… Read More
2018-12-13 14:35
With the era of the humble unstyled and unscripted input field behind us, there’s increasing variety in how monetary inputs work on the web. And this inconsistency can lead to big mist… Read More
2018-07-31 13:24
I just finished binging the latest release of Terrace House, a reality TV show from Japan. If you’re not familiar, Terrace House is hands down the slowest and quietest reality televis… Read More
2018-06-19 12:17
Welcome to another installment of the collective nouns survey. This time we focus on Overwatch, following surveys for Team Fortress 2 and Starcraft.
In Overwatch, there are 27 playable her… Read More
2018-03-08 13:29
I recently got a new phone that supports wireless charging, allowing me to switch out my rather hefty clock radio dock for a teeny wireless charging pad, continuing the minimalist march in… Read More
2017-10-13 13:18
The Problem
The clutter. While I admit this setup is cleaner than most, there’s still the white power strip peeking out and the Nintendo Switch obscuring a corner of the TV. Then ther… Read More
2017-04-03 14:37
I’m pleased to announce Grid Garden, a sequel to Flexbox Froggy. This time, you’ll learn about CSS grid, the hot new layout module, and cultivate a carrot or two in the process… Read More
2017-02-28 13:51
Last week, a fun article titled fitteR happieR crowned the most depressing Radiohead song as True Love Waits. This was determined by a “gloom index” calculated with Spotify&rsquo&hell…Read More
2017-02-21 13:08
From deep in the vaults, here’s an app called QuickLine that I made and then promptly forgot about in 2014. It’s a Mac utility for quickly saving and launching terminal commands… Read More
2017-02-06 14:07
It goes without saying that Stack Overflow is an invaluable resource for any coder seeking help. This is in large part because they enforce stringent guidelines such as sticking to factual q… Read More
2017-01-30 19:11
So here’s a fun but useless trick: mimicking Pokemon Go’s battery saver mode on the web. For the few who missed the craze, Pokemon Go dims your phone’s screen when you turn… Read More
2017-01-23 18:18
Footnotes
An xkcd tribute inspired by what has become a meme.
Also inspired by all things recursive like We Become What We Behold and xkcd itself.
Made with the official xkcd font.
Ca… Read More
2017-01-16 13:20
Fidgeting is a natural impulse that seems to relieve our anxiety and aid us in contemplation. It often involves mindlessly interacting with everyday objects like stones, pen and paper, bubb… Read More
2017-01-09 13:35
Since Steve Job’s return in 1997, Apple has been bold about dropping legacy I/O standards, on a knife edge between marching the state-of-the-art forward and convincing the world to fol… Read More
2016-04-25 14:05
A bad web form sparked a series of increasingly absurd designs for inputting phone numbers, including an incrementer, slider, random number generator, and very large table. Here’s a go… Read More
2015-11-25 13:26
I’ve created a game for learning CSS flexbox called Flexbox Froggy. The goal of the game is to help the frogs get to their lilypads by writing CSS code. See if you can beat all the le… Read More
2015-11-19 13:05
Even if you’ve never watched an episode of The Joy of Painting, there’s a good chance you’re familiar with artist Bob Ross, with his trademark afro and “happy little… Read More
2015-11-16 13:07
As of this month, 25 percent of all websites are using WordPress, according to W3Techs survey. This ubiquity was one of the leading factors in choosing WordPress as the platform for Snowball… Read More
2015-11-13 00:59
I just returned from another great Mozilla Festival. For most of the attendees, Mozfest seems to be a chance to kick back and celebrate the daily work they do with their teams. For me, it wa… Read More
2015-08-05 14:31
As web developers, the deal is that we try to support our users on all the different platforms they might use to view our site. Generally speaking, that spans everything from the latest mobi… Read More
2015-08-03 14:09
Like most web developers, Google Fonts is an indispensable resource for me. What would otherwise be a choice between sticking to a small handful of web safe fonts or wrangling WOFFs, OTFs, a… Read More
2015-07-22 13:53
Scoped CSS is a new feature that makes it possible to add elements anywhere in your document, scoping the CSS rules it contains to its parent element. This was just what we needed while dev… Read More
2015-07-20 13:30
Since May, our research group has been developing a new tool called Snowball. As with our other tools, the purpose of Snowball is to empower people from all sorts of backgrounds to express… Read More
2015-01-21 12:25
You have two choices when it comes to formatting academic papers for conferences and journals: Microsoft Word and LaTeX.
Word is familiar and easy for anyone to pick up. But the WYSIWYG inte… Read More
2014-04-23 12:27
A recent post about efforts to counter the declining popularity of golf got me thinking. I’m a pretty terrible golfer, but still have fond memories of playing with friends and family o… Read More
2014-02-27 18:32
In Team Fortress 2, there are nine playable classes with unique personalities and complementary abilities: pyro, engineer, spy, heavy, sniper, scout, soldier, demo, and medic.
When referrin… Read More
2013-11-11 11:54
In math, you’re sometimes so focused on getting the calculations right that you end up with nonsensical answers without realizing it. In web design there’s a similar phenomenon… Read More
2013-11-05 14:52
Right now we’re blessed with many, well, awesome icon fonts that continue to grow with every release, like Font Awesome, Glyphicons, and Ionicons. And game-changers like Iconic might b… Read More
2013-10-22 14:56
I’m headed to Mozilla Festival this week, after spending the summer working for Mozilla Webmaker. Everything at Webmaker is a team effort, so I helped out on a number of projects and h… Read More
2013-04-01 12:08
We’ve all run into CAPTCHAs, those annoying registration fields you never get right on the first try. But CAPTCHAs do play a valuable role, keeping spambots out by verifying that you&r&hell…Read More
2013-03-31 18:50
One feature that’s often overlooked in iOS is adding webpages to your homescreen. You even get a nice retina icon if the webpage author designates one.
Naturally, my mind went to how t… Read More
2013-02-07 13:14
A visitor to your site decides to follow you on Twitter. You have a link in your footer — but their search for “Twitter” comes up empty and they move on. Unfortunately, you… Read More
2012-12-19 16:15
In 2011, for the first time, Amazon sold more Kindle ebooks than paperbacks. Last June, ebook sales surpassed hardcovers for all of the US. The futurist dream of a paperless world is slowly… Read More
2012-12-12 12:56
iTunes 11 marks a significant departure from previous versions. While many of the changes are problematic (another post for another time), I want to focus on one positive: the expanding albu… Read More
2012-10-20 17:11
For those who aren’t familiar, Hacker News is a popular site where a community of techies discuss a wide range of topics. According to HN’s guidelines, on-topic submissions are … Read More
2012-08-12 19:17
It’s a great time to learn to code.
It seems as long as there’s been the web, there’s been text tutorials on coding. But now we’re seeing the rise of lecture videos (… Read More
2012-07-10 02:37
Last year, I posted a gallery of every Apple Store ever. It was a quick and dirty project, made on a whim. But it eventually took on a life of its own, getting coverage from such heavyweight… Read More
2012-02-14 21:39
Although I spilled the beans in an interview yesterday, I wanted to formally announce a personal project called Bootswatch. It’s a collection of themed swatches that you can download f… Read More
2012-02-01 15:08
I recently spent way too much time trying to find a domain for a project. Every good .com, and even most of the terrible ones, had long been claimed by squatters.
This got me to wonder how s… Read More
2012-01-17 23:04
Today our attention is divided among many apps on many devices, networked and constantly updating. Given this, status badges are used more than ever to help users maintain awareness. They&rs&hell…Read More
2012-01-04 14:43
Here’s a quick guide to multitouch gestures on Kindle Touch, since Amazon doesn’t provide documentation and some commands are less than obvious. Gestures include taps, holds, swi… Read More
2012-01-03 15:09
Over at 99designs, businesses can hold contests to get logos designed for them. To provide better direction to identity designers than “I’ll know it when I see it” or &ldqu&hell…Read More
2011-12-16 17:43
Google has been making sweeping changes to the look of their products. One of these changes is the addition of density control. With a couple of clicks, users of Gmail and Reader can now swi… Read More
2011-12-07 16:44
I was lucky enough to receive a Kindle Touch as an early Christmas present. To be clear, I love it as a long-form reading device, from its weight to its battery life to its integration with… Read More
2011-11-09 02:27
Way back in August of 2001, some good friends and I took a road trip down to Virginia to attend a concert. Unfortunately the rains came, the venue got flooded, and the concert was cancelled… Read More
2011-11-01 16:06
Despite its name, Google Reader had up until now three levels of use:
Reader: read RSS items
Linkroll: share RSS items with friends
Social network: converse on these shared RSS items with th… Read More
2011-10-21 18:28
Yesterday, Microsoft’s Steven Sinofsky responded to chatter about how Windows 8, in its grand debut, was demoed almost exclusively in landscape mode. In the post, he affirms Windows 8… Read More
2011-10-16 15:08
The Building Windows 8 blog offers some fascinating insight into Microsoft’s research and design processes. Take the recent post on improving Windows Explorer.
It begins with a discus… Read More
2011-10-12 16:50
I had a bunch of relatives from Korea visit over the summer, and naturally an arm wrestling tournament broke out. What I found most interesting though was how they set up the initial match-u… Read More
2011-10-10 17:23
The hallmark of Google Plus so far has been Circles. In contrast to Facebook where you’re either a friend or you’re not (until you put people into lists), Circles has you categor… Read More
2011-10-07 13:59
A post on my impressions of Ubuntu 11 led to lots of thoughtful discussion here and over at Hacker News. The part that seemed to generate the most interest was my take on why certain menus s… Read More
2011-10-02 14:10
For a while now, I’ve been using my home machine with MAMP to develop a research prototype. But last week, I got my hands on a PC to use as a web server. Before I could get started on… Read More
2011-09-26 16:12
The folks over at Devour maintain a nice collection of videos, wrapped in a clean interface. One of the touches is that each video is presented using what I call the Devour Effect: a text de… Read More
2011-09-20 15:40
In my experimentation with HTML5, I ended up making Trebek, a web app that allows you to play along at home with Jeopardy! The idea is that by trying to answer questions before the contestan… Read More
2011-09-09 15:39
Yesterday, I showed a graphic that lays out popular devices by display size. In this post, I want to show a version created using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The upside of doing this programm… Read More
2011-09-08 17:14
With new devices being released at such a rapid pace, it’s hard to keep up. Perhaps the most frenzied of the bunch has been Samsung, who’s adopted a mentality of “let&rsquo&hell…Read More
2011-09-03 14:40
I love me some fantasy baseball. Mainly when I’m near the top. With the regular season winding down and the playoffs set to start, my team sits comfortably in second place (in a league… Read More
2011-08-31 12:27
I previously talked about why the current Apple TV is a stopgap for the true Apple TV. With that in mind, I want to discuss my experience with the current model and what it means for an even… Read More
2011-08-28 17:19
In the face of rumors that Apple is working on a TV, many remain skeptical that they would get into such a commoditized business. Let me offer some counterpoints.
The boundary between comp… Read More
2011-08-24 12:51
After nearly a decade of service, my messenger bag is finally giving up the ghost. I’ve been looking for a replacement that’s smaller and lighter: just enough to hold a 13-inch M… Read More
2011-08-17 19:49
Major versions sure don’t go as far as they used to. Both Google and Mozilla have adopted rapid release schedules for their web browsers, aiming for four or more major releases per yea… Read More
2011-05-18 14:14
Groups of animals get special collective nouns1, some of which are familiar (e.g., a pride of lions, a gaggle of geese) and others that are less known but equally evocative: a crash of rhino… Read More
2011-05-04 10:32
I’m not the only one who’s noticed that blue icons seem to be totally overrepresented. But is it really this bad, or is the confirmation bias just acting up again? I decided to f… Read More
2011-04-12 20:32
The other day, I was having breakfast and scouring the cereal box for reading material when I came across the new food pyramid. What had they done!
This version apparently replaced the old… Read More
2011-04-07 03:37
Earlier this week, David Friedman proposed a new save icon to replace the antiquated floppy disk. In the ensuing discussion, many noted that with automatic revision control à la Googl… Read More
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