Nice little thoughtful touch:
When you go to the accessibility settings on iOS, there’s a preference for on/off labels on switches.
If it’s off, it’s the only switch that has a little “o” inside it, hinting at its purpose.
Remote
Jim Nielsen
@jimniels@mastodon.social
mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06Designer, developer, blogger.
Lover of food and websites.
Icon-noisseur https://www.iosicongallery.com
Publisher of feeds. You should subscribe.
2162 Followers
276 Following
50 Posts
Joined December 13, 2022
Website:
Every once and a while, somebody will reach out to me about one of the app icons in my icon site because their company has done some kind of brand refresh and they want me to update the app icon / logo.
And there's this part of me that is like, “Have you completely missed the point of this site? It’s an archive. I archive icons for archival type purposes. Updating it to match whatever brand refresh you did is like the very antithesis of why I made this site in the first place.”
📝 tl;dr
- Downtime is mainstream now.
- Status pages are the public interface for understanding it.
- Uptime percentages are a lousy interface for general understanding.
- Can we stop?
https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/stop-with-the-uptime-percentage/
If you haven’t seen it yet, Mandy Brown’s new website is dope
Lots of things to love. A few that stand out to me:
- It's _fast_
- Every page has a “footer” that’s essentially just the home page — enthralled by this idea.
- ❤️ the treatment for citations on post pages
Our 6y/o (who is a quiet kid—outside of our home) told us today that a kid at school asked him, “Why are you so quiet?” And another kid said, “Yeah, why are you so quiet?” And he said, “I didn’t answer them.”
📝 You know, those things we all do even though individual experience suggests otherwise.
https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/nobody-believes-it-everybody-does-it/
📝 Post-mortem on my "lots of little HTML pages" approach — still like it.
The browser's most basic feature is following a link. What if you built a site’s interactions around just that?
e.g. a "menu" could just be: and a dash of CSS view transitions for flair.
I keep thinking of that phrase — something like, “They reduce the meaning of the word to that which their machines can achieve.” And now I just see it everywhere.
- They made artificial "intelligence".
- They made a "browser" in a weekend.
- They added “presence” to the UI.
Rich human concepts narrowed to fit what a technology can achieve, then they lay claim to the name.
9y/o: “Have we had the smallpox vaccine?”
Me: “Yes”
6y/o: “What about the bigpox vaccine?”
lol, in a cruel twist of fate, AI turned coders into the very thing they abhorred most: managers.
📝 In our age of generative AI, a blank page is a deliberate act!
Somebody asked me for a few sites I really enjoy looking at as well as reading. I figured I'd repurpose my response as broadcast content :)
https://anhvn.com/
https://robinrendle.com/
https://maggieappleton.com/
https://tylergaw.com/
https://chsmc.org/
https://rachsmith.com/
https://dbushell.com/
https://lynnandtonic.com/
https://ryanmulligan.dev/
https://www.nicchan.me/
📝 I published my story of my encounter with Om Malik.
What a simple but indelible example of kindness and thoughtfulness.
Claude Science? When do we get Claude Religion?
Replying to
“How did you get into computers?”
“Piracy”
📝 Quite enjoyed this talk about how intelligence alone isn’t enough. Other human values are vital to collaborative efforts, like resilience and optimism — and, I might add, humor (which shines through in the talk).
📝 I fixed a problem of my own making.
I went to local builds/deploys for my notes site. So far I'm digging it. Might do it with more of my sites.
https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/fewer-computers-fewer-problems/
There is so much to unpack in this image alone, I don't even know where to start
https://mudmapmagazine.com/the-utopia-of-the-family-computer/
I hate when my music library drifts over time.
Example:
- Add "Phantom of the Opera" to my library
- 3 years pass
- Now there's 5 "Phantom of the Opera" albums in my library, each with only a partial set of songs.
I guess the mistake here is calling it _my_ music library.
It's not mine. It’s Apple’s.
What’s mine are the pointers to Apple’s music catalog.
Apple (& rights holders) get to decide what constitutes an album — now and in the future.
📝 Speed isn't everything, not even in a relay race. The interfaces between people (represented by the baton) can nullify whatever speed you have. Faster individuals don't necessarily make a faster team.
https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/collective-speed-isnt-the-sum-of%20individual-speed/
📝 Computers and the internet are a two-edged sword for me — thx for making me have to confront this realization before I was ready @davatron5000@mastodon.social lol
https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/two-edged-sword-of-computers-and-internet/
This is kind of a cool read, especially in an era where the excuse for most technology is “well you can’t un-invent it”
you can’t put the genie back in the bottle, but you can (willingly or not) forget how to summon him
https://newsletters.feedbinusercontent.com/caa/caaada612102544292258341ec645342ec7829fc.html
UIs be like:
---
Your choices:
[Dropdown]
---
lol, no I believe those are _your_ choices.
Negation is creative
Replying to
@davatron5000 lol whoops, did that thing where it started as a note boosting what you said, but turned into more thoughts than I expected and thus a Full Blog Post™️
https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/re-people-arent-friction/
📝 Story about a family vacation when I was a teen and our car kept overheating and nobody could fix it without hooking it up to a computer.
https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/hook-it-up-to-the-machine/
Wherever I am, the world comes after me.
It offers me its busyness. It does not believe that I do not want it. Now I understand why the old poets of China went so far and high into the mountains
— Mary Oliver
TFW previous you made the right abstraction, so the next chunk of work you need to do just slides right in
> They'd say
> “Well, how could we have known?”
> I'll tell them: “It's not so hard to tell”
Subtext of Jack Johnson lyrics hitting hard today lol
Even in my own personal projects — let alone stuff at work — it is so incredibly hard to say "no".
Yet once again, I've found that if I just cut more stuff out, things get better.
One thing I've learned about me: if my spidey sense says “that’s a terrible idea for a business”, it’ll do well if somebody has the gall to do it.
📝 Just me reflecting on a word choice I saw in a UI. No biggie.
Replying to
@tylersticka this is catnip for me — we need a post behind the post! this guy seriously makes me laugh out loud
Let me tell you something: when it comes to software, it takes a lot of effort to choose to do so little.
Replying to
@davatron5000 ❤️ thx for writing.
For my spare time, I think I've been trying to operate within a subconcious priority of constituencies that probably looks something like:
family >
irl friends >
online friends >
irl personal projects >
online personal projects >
online junk food >
irl junk food
but i need to flesh it out more because there's a lot of nuance in there, like how do i think of time spent with overlapping areas such as online gaming w/family and a bag of chips? lol
Boosted by @Gargron@mastodon.social
I keep thinking of that phrase — something like, “They reduce the meaning of the word to that which their machines can achieve.” And now I just see it everywhere.
- They made artificial "intelligence".
- They made a "browser" in a weekend.
- They added “presence” to the UI.
Rich human concepts narrowed to fit what a technology can achieve, then they lay claim to the name.
📝 I was trying to write a `:has()` selector with `:visited` and it wasn't working as expected. Turns out it wasn’t a bug, it was the browser telling what MDN calls “a little white lie” ha!
RE: @davatron5000@mastodon.social
I was not cool. Mine was the most mass-produced one ever made by Sony. But I didn't know that as an 8y/o so I thought it was friggin awesome. Now looking back, I see it was:
> cheap, plastic, often noisy, but fairly decent
just like me!
Replying to
@tylergaw@mastodon.social haha oh man, HUGE boost for this one. I wrote a crude version of this same post [checks notes] 4 years ago
https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2022/browser-level-color-scheme-preference/
Love the thought/detail you put into this. How do I call my local web representative and send them this for consideration? Ha
Replying to
@davatron5000 the weird part is when these things end up in combinations, like
scrolling IG to find funny memes to send to my wife vs. shipping that new feature on the blog
that's a weird intersection of like high prio + low prio vs. a mid-level prio, what's one to do?
btw i loved your description of how you made that little hack that only allows one youtube browser tab at a time. they should just build that into browsers ha — compulsive cmd+click -> legion youtube tabs is a real thing
Replying to
@lynnandtonic@front-end.social me looking at this website:
"new found glory? weezer? blink-182? green day? the format? gosh she saw some great bands back in the early 00's! how'd she remember all these details?"
then i checked the dates lol
cool website — even cooler experiences i'm sure
Replying to
@pawelgrzybek @bramus this just made me realize that having songs in Apple Music is like having kids in your home: you can put all the energy and effort you want into making it clean and tidy, but they’re just gonna mess it up over time lol