Ian Betteridge:

Most Mac users of a certain age remember Power Computing, the Mac cloner who undercut Apple with better machines back in the mid-90s. Apple ended up buying Power Computing out and putting an end to the clone market. Well if you can’t compete, use your financial muscle.

It’s often said that Apple bought the company – but it didn’t. Even Wikipedia gets this wrong, claiming that Power was an Apple subsidiary. In fact, what Apple bought was the Mac-related assets of Power, including the license to make Mac clones. Apple did not acquire the company.

It sure is a sad tale. The Wikipedia page is an interesting read too.

By the end of January 1998, Power was gone. Ironically, if the company had survived for longer, the $100m in Apple stock would have been worth a lot, lot more than Power itself ever was or could have been.

According to Stockulator That $100M of 1997 Apple stock would now be worth $122.33B, and would have paid $4.5B in dividends!

Igor Ljubuncic:

Quite often, I wonder how much nostalgia plays part in our perception of past events. Luckily, with software, you can go “back” and retest it, and so there’s no need for any illusions and misconceptions. To wit, I decided to reinstall and try Windows 7 again (as a virtual machine, but still), to see whether my impressions of the dross we call “modern” software today are justified.

If you’re wondering how I feel, I’ve said it before. Windows 10 is about the same as Windows 7. There aren’t any big differences, except more annoyances and more “online” nonsense that adds zero value to the actual user experience. For me, the leap from XP to 7 was a good one, mostly because the latter came with improved 64-bit support. But ever since? I left XP with three years remaining on its support clock. I left 7 with maybe a month left. With 10, I have absolute zero intentions of moving to the low-IQ Windows 11. Linux, it is, but if push comes to shove, Mac might also be an option. But I digress. Let’s check the last real desktop Windows.

Until Windows 10, the last Windows I used regularly was Windows 2000, so I never used Windows 7 myself. From the outside though, it does seem like it was peak mouse and keyboard desktop Windows. After Windows 7 there seems to be a series of experiments and annoyances that nobody actually wants.

So what do we have here? Looks? Yup, still nice, still relevant. And much better ergonomics, too. Thick, human scrollbars, good clarity and separation between foreground and background elements. None of that modern flatness crap. No touch-like crap, either, so everything is easy to use. Faster, more efficient, too.

You don’t get asked five million questions about camera and speech and Bluetooth and location and other pointless nonsense that have no place on the desktop. Smartphones, okay, but classic PCs, hell no. The software works as it should, and you don’t have to contend with low-IQ website wrappers pretending to be “apps”. The system is super fast and responsive, even as a virtual machine.

Oh the questions! Why on earth must I go through the same “first-run” questions every time there’s a major update to Windows 11¹. I still don’t want an Office trial. I still don’t want to use Edge. I still don’t want to use OneDrive. For goodness sake, just accept my initial responses and boot into the goddamn desktop.

Matthew Ström:

Interfaces are becoming less dense.

I’m usually one to be skeptical of nostalgia and “we liked it that way” bias, but comparing websites and applications of 2024 to their 2000s-era counterparts, the spreading out of software is hard to ignore.

To explain this trend, and suggest how we might regain density, I started by asking what, exactly, UI density is. It’s not just the way an interface looks at one moment in time; it’s about the amount of information an interface can provide over a series of moments. It’s about how those moments are connected through design decisions, and how those decisions are connected to the value the software provides.

I’d like to share what I found. Hopefully this exploration helps you define UI density in concrete and useable terms. If you’re a designer, I’d like you to question the density of the interfaces you’re creating; if you’re not a designer, use the lens of UI density to understand the software you use.

This post could have been a long rant about the lack of density in modern user interfaces. Instead, Matthew calmly explores multiple dimensions of UI density and how contemporary trends and tastes may be met while respecting the user.

This post by Conrad Irwin on the Zed blog is about the roadmap for Vim features in Zed in 2025, but this section caught my eye:

People who switch to Zed from Vim are attracted by the “just works by default” aspect of Zed: language servers just work, and the advanced features (AI, collaboration). But, nothing is more frustrating than a Vim mode that doesn’t work exactly like Vim. We get a lot of VS Code Vim extension refugees, and the number one complaint is that “it just didn’t feel right”.

Zed is already much closer to Vim. We have extensive “side-by-side” testing where we run headless Neovim to ensure our keyboard shortcuts do exactly the same thing. That said, there’s always more to do, both to add the remaining minor motions zL/ zH come to mind, and fix edge cases in things like d]}.

I have been impressed by Zed’s mode, it did in fact just work™ for the most part when I started using the first Linux version of Zed¹. They clearly consider it a core part of the Zed experience and are dedicated to making it feel correct with that side-by-side testing. In many other editors the vim mode feels like an afterthought, tacked on to appease those vim weirdos. I’m glad that’s not the case here.

In a post on my own blog:

Stylus is an open-source browser extension for managing and applying “user styles”—custom snippets of CSS—to websites. It allows you to tweak sites you visit to tailor them to your preferences. In this post I list the ways I use Stylus to make my browsing experience nicer.

I set out to write this post to describe all the ways I use Stylus to mould the web to my will. It turns out that mostly boils down to setting max-width on sites that are too wide for comfortable reading, and replacing fonts with ones I think look better… it does include a rule to banish those awful “Sign in With Google” pop-ups though.

On the Fediverse Di replied with this great tip:

I’ve been using Stylus to hide pictures of a certain person that’s been in the news a lot lately:

img[alt*="nameOfPerson"] {
  visibility: hidden;
}

It has made my life much better.