Marcin Wichary:

There are fun things you can do in software when it is aware of the dimensions and features of its hardware. [...]

The rule here would be, perhaps, a version of “show, don’t tell.” We could call it “point to, don’t describe.” (Describing what to do means cognitive effort to read the words and understand them. An arrow pointing to something should be easier to process.)

I just learned the word proprioception a few weeks ago, in the context of how you can close your eyes and put your fingertip on the tip of your nose. Perfect word for this sort of hardware/software integration too.

Jason Snell:

So here we are: Six Colors now has three Jeopardy! players as contributors.

Come on, Moltz, get your shit together.

When I re-read my 2006 piece “And Oranges” today before linking to it, I paused when I read this:

And while it is easy to find ways to complain that Apple is not open enough — under-documented and undocumented security updates and system revisions, under-documented and undocumented file formats — it would be hard to argue with the premise that Apple today is more open than it has ever been before. (Exhibit A: the Web Kit project.)

It’s not often I get to fix 20-year-old typos, and to my 2026 self, “Web Kit” looks like an obvious typo. But after a moment, I remembered: in 2006, that wasn’t a typo.

The correct order is Fn, Control, Option, Shift, Command — regardless if you’re using the words or the glyphs.

“Mr. Macintosh”, on Twitter/X last week:

Small change:

Looks like Apple updated the keyboard on the new M5 16‑inch MacBook Pro. The Backspace, Return, Shift, and Tab labels are gone, replaced with symbols instead.

All the new MacBook keyboards sport this same change, including the M5 Air and A18 Pro MacBook Neo. I’m not a fan. I like the words on those keys. But I’m willing to admit it might just be that I’ve been using Apple keyboards with words on those keys since I was like 10 years old. iOS 26 switched from the word “return” to the “⏎” glyph on the software keyboard (and removed the word “space” from the spacebar — which, in hindsight, seemed needless to label).

The Escape key is still labelled “esc”, and the modifier keys (Fn, Control, Option, and Command) still show the names underneath or next to the glyphs. I suspect this is because documentation — including Apple’s own — often uses names for these keys (Option-Shift-Command-K), not the glyphs (⌥⇧⌘K). It’s only in the last few years that Apple began including the glyphs for Control (⌃) and Option (⌥) — until recently, those keys were labelled only by name. They added the ⌃ and ⌥ glyphs between 2017 and 2018. And until that change in 2018, Apple added the label “alt” to the Option key — a visual turd so longstanding that it dates back even to my own beloved keyboard.

Outside the U.S., Apple has been using glyphs for these key caps for a long time. The change from words to glyphs is new only here.