Jim Nielsen’s Blog

本頁 16 篇

• Celebrating SIM Cards

  It’s time to celebrate a little win. The other day, my mom contacted me saying her 10-year-old iPhone wouldn’t turn on. After getting a hold of the device and doing some family IT support, I concluded the battery was dead. So I bought her a new (old) one on Walmart (SE 3rd gen., if you must know). Her old phone used a SIM card, so I was expecting the process to go something like this: Take the SIM out of the old phone Put it in the new phone Setup the device Troubleshoot why there was no service

  2026/10/30 03:00https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/celebrating-sim-cards/

• Why My Dad Didn’t Have a Cell Phone

  Here’s Dave Rupert writing about all those emails, texts, phone calls, etc. we’re getting these days: Once upon a time it had utility, now it’s all noise and grifter slop demanding our attention and giving us to-dos That last part really hit: “giving us to-dos”. I feel this. So many of the messenger apps on my phone are other people laying claim to my time and attention. It reminds me of an interaction I had with my Dad years ago. This was back when cell phones were starting to become ubiquitous

  2026/10/26 03:00https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/why-dad-didnt-have-cellphone/

• No Need for Retirement When Utopia Is Around the Corner

  I’ve mentioned before my interest in the history and development of nuclear weapons. Currently, I’m reading The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner by Daniel Ellsberg (of Pentagon Papers renown). In the first chapter, Ellsberg talks about his time working at the RAND Corporation during the missile gap years when the U.S. thought it was falling behind the Soviet Union in nuclear capabilities. Many of his descriptions sound strikingly similar to the rhetoric coming out of places

  2026/10/22 03:00https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/skip-retirement-for-utopia/

• No More Icons In Every Menu By Default

  Have you heard the good news? I bemoaned the approach of putting an icon in every menu item by default which shipped with macOS Tahoe — but now it’s gone in Golden Gate! John Gruber wrote about this reversion back in June, including the fact that Apple’s new Human Interface Guidelines specifically call out Tahoe’s approach to menus as an example of what not to do on macOS. As the old saying goes, it takes a big man corporation to admit when they’re wrong. As I mentioned in my original post, one

  2026/10/20 03:00https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/icons-in-every-menu/

• We Need All the Disciplines

  From where I sit, figuring out what to build, building it, and shipping it are all part of the art of making software. Many disciplines have emerged through the years to facilitate this work: product, design, engineering, devops, etc. We need all these disciplines to make great, dependable software (granted, in different doses). Each brings different values and judgments; each sees things the others don’t. And including all might mean going a bit slower. Human collaboration may seem less “effici

  2026/10/16 03:00https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/we-need-all-disciplines/

• The Dock on Mac, From OS 10 to macOS 27

  I wrote the chapter on app icon history for The iOS App Icon Book. The other day I found an old note stashed away where I had started researching the macOS version of that chapter (which Michael ultimately ended up writing). At the time, I didn’t know what to write. I mean, how do you write a history of icon design for the Mac? It’s rich! To get my creative juices flowing, I started by researching the different docks in macOS through the years and compiled them all into a single graphic (big sho

  2026/10/13 03:00https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/macos-dock-icons-over-time/

• The Fascinating World of Domains

  Pete Millspaugh has a lovely article over on WIRED that peers into the world of domains. (If you’re as interested in the esoteric details of domains as I am, follow Pete’s writing at Dot Com Press.) You should just read the article, but here are a few things that stood out to me. The .com Registry Did you know who the registry for .com is? I didn’t. The registry that owns .com, Verisign, makes a billion and a half dollars every year just by keeping the lights on. To Verisign’s credit, the lights

  2026/10/12 03:00https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/domains-article-on-wired/

• “Getting off the Modernization Treadmill”

  My notes from this talk by Alexander Petros at Big Sky DevCon 2026. Alex starts by noting how “modernize” used to mean something along the lines of “update this thing that was made before I was born”. But now “modernize” means something more like “update this thing from 5-10 years ago” (hence the framing of the talk, the “modernization treadmill”). Using a real-world example of an incredibly slow website that was required to access state-sponsored programs for welfare, Alex points out the dispar

  2026/10/9 03:00https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/talk-notes-modernization-treadmill/

• Apple’s App Icon HOA

  Louie Mantia has a great post about how app icons are converging towards the squircle on iOS and macOS. His post reads like a history. If you’re wondering, “How did we get to a place where all app icons are becoming squircles?” Mantia’s post answers that question by starting at the beginning. It’s hard to walk away from Mantia’s article without a sense of empathy for Apple’s position, like “Oh ok, I get why they’re doing what they’re doing. It makes sense.” Apple’s direction is kind of a tacit a

  2026/10/7 03:00https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/app-icon-hoa/

• “I’m Embarrassed on Behalf of the Tech Industry”

  That’s something Ben Thompson said a recent episode of Dithering. He was referring to how he felt while trying to help his mom get control of her digital life. Everything was just too hard and convoluted and he felt embarrassed as someone who works in tech. That very same evening, I randomly got this text from a family member. I hear this a lot from family and friends who sit outside tech. “Nothing works.” “Everything is hard to use.” “I can’t make sense of this.” And to them I am a representati

  2026/10/5 03:00https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/embarrassed-by-tech/

• Dear Software Makers

  Marques Brownlee just released a video essay titled “Dear YouTube”. I loved it. He talks about how YouTube is going to start shipping this new feature where makers can essentially publish different “variants” of their videos and see which performs best (an A/B test). Which immediately begs a lot of questions. Brownlee voices his: If I’m watching a video, do I know if it’s part of one of these A/B tests? If I’m reading the comments of a video, how do I know I saw the same thing as another comment

  2026/10/1 03:00https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/dear-software-makers/

• VLM Enhanced Metadata For My Icon Galleries

  Confession: I got nerd-sniped by Sam Henri Gold’s request for my icon galleries: I'd like to humbly request artwork-level searching in macosicongallery.com What follows is a train-of-thought blog post as I play with what an implementation might look like. I’ve actually long-wanted something like this, e.g. let me search for “coffee” and show me all icons that have some depiction of coffee in them. Similarly, I’ve wanted some kind of “related” representation for icons. I have this today via exist

  2026/9/30 03:00https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/icon-galleries-vlm/

• Humane Interfaces

  So there I am reading Unsung when I come across this quote from Jef Raskin: An interface is humane if it is responsive to human needs and considerate of human frailties. This articulation perfectly captures why I recoil at modern “growth tactics” in user interfaces and experiences: they are designed to exploit human frailties, not be considerate of them. Stated again: a humane interface — or a humane system, even a humane technology — is considerate of human frailties. It acknowledges they exist

  2026/9/28 03:00https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/humane-interfaces/

• Using an LLM to Automate the Process of Archiving New macOS App Icons

  Whenever a new version of macOS drops, I find myself archiving the new app icons for my macOS icon gallery. In the past, the work to do this was a bit tedious. First, I’d find the app in the “Applications” folder (or elsewhere on the Mac), right click and choose “Get Info”: Right-click the app icon in the Get Info pane and choose “Copy”: Open the Preview app and go “File -> New from Clipboard”: This gets me the app icon file with a variety of sizes (the 1024-pixel version is the one I want). Fro

  2026/9/26 03:00https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/faster-app-icon-retrieval/

• Make Money to Make More Websites

  I was listening to the episode “Make Your Own Thing” from the Off Protocol podcast where Jim Ray interviews John Gruber. They cover a variety of topics, including Gruber’s thoughts on the dilution of personal brand by publishing through “chain” platforms like Substack (I quite enjoyed the metaphor of a personal website where you publish your stuff to that of a chef/restaurant, but that’s a separate post). Around ~1:13:00, Gruber quotes Walt Disney who said, “We don't make movies to make money, w

  2026/9/24 03:00https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/make-money-to-make-more-websites/

• A Great Story Capturing the Essence of Being Online in 2026

  I made a note of it, but Bryan Cantrill wrote a post about the ex-Anthropic employee who pegged the probability of AI killing humanity in the next decade at >10%. The article is a good one and you should read it, but what I want to capture here is a side story from Cantrill on the Oxide and Friends podcast where he talks about how proud he was of this phrase from his post: “These ghoulish claims strike brazenly at the hearth…”. He notes that someone online commented on that phrase, saying it so…

  2026/9/22 03:00https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/online-in-2026/