In ATP Episode 439 Marco Arment had a good speech on UI stability, I even took time to write it down. It starts at 35:07:

UIs so often lack stability. It is such a critical quality. You want the UI to be stable.

Not every surface should be “live”... If you try to select some text on a website with a mouse on a desktop, you don’t want every single thing that you can click on or accidentally brush against with your finger on a phone to be something that is live, that does something. You want stability, you want things to feel solid, and predictable, and forgiving. And not being so susceptible to things like accidental input or imprecision in input... People are doing things unintentionally.

You also don’t want the UI to be moving around when people are trying to use it. And I feel like a lot of the current Mac design language these days, where everything is being hidden behind hover states and then things animate somewhere out of the way and change where they are... this is all violations of UI stability. It makes everything a hot zone or a live zone. And things are jumping around, and it’s disorienting, and it’s inefficient, and it’s unintuitive as well, and undiscoverable and all sorts of other problems.

Anything you can do to make a UI more stable in a sense that things don’t move around too much, there aren’t too many different modes where things come in and out or slide around, or pop in, or pop out, that makes it easier and better and more calm to use for more people. And it’s a better design.

I’ve shown you the Stockholm metro in detail.

But I’ve got a lot more from Stockholm. Today it’s the airport and the connection to the city.

Arrivals:

It’s a great idea to point to the next restroom in the narrow hallway:

In the baggage claim area there is a nice advertisement for the express buses to the city:

Swedish is white, English is yellow. Customs has two spaces:

Passage to another terminal:

Stairs to the boarding gates. Curiously, the arrows and exit numbers are yellow, not white:

But I had to go to the city, and the express bus didn’t appeal to me. It turned out to be cheaper and more interesting to get there by regular transportation, not a dedicated airport service. I took a bus to a place called Märsta, then a commuter train from there.

Outside the airport:

The bus stop:

Bus 583 to Märsta:

An almost-selfie from the bus:

A bus stop in Märsta:

The commuter train station next to it:

The trains await at the platform:

A sign:

The door doesn’t open automatically. A funny character points to the button from above:

Inside the train:

There’s an ad in the transportation system style here, too, like I’ve shown on metro trains before. Nice:

The “don’t sit with your feet on the other seat” icon:

I got off at Stockholm’s Central Station and some people went further on. Now the character points to the button from below:

After three days in Stockholm, I went back to the airport — this time, on the very bus from the ad. It runs from the Central Station as well. The boarding gate has automatic doors:

Departures:

The map of terminal 5:

The pictures are from the trip in June 2016.

See also:

• All posts about Stockholm metro (follow the “Continued” links)

Check out the case about one of the stages in Chelyabinsk transit reform communication — route changes from January 1, 2022:

Check out my design project from 2019: an online store for ‘Dom Toma’. I had to manage to show both the variety of the collection and the individuality of the items. Repost everywhere and come back for good design!

At the introduction of Vision Pro, Apple showed that you could look at your watch or phone while wearing the headset, and everything would look fine. It was another demonstration that you’re not isolated from the rest of the world, and you can use all the familiar things as usual.

As for me, I thought it wasn’t cool enough. The familiar things can take on magical properties when you look through Vision Pro. For example, on iPhone or Apple Watch, things that required scrolling can fit in without scrolling.

Good news everyone. The app Emcee that we made together with Alexey Blinov, now works in macOS Ventura:

If you didn’t know about Emcee:

Other apps distract with semi-transparent widgets over what you do. Yet, when you wonder what’s playing, there is no ansnwer on the screen.

Emcee is always visible. The song name does not scroll, it stands still.

Click for playback controls. Alt-Click for needle drop.

The way the menu bar works on the Mac is that if any item on the right no longer fits, it simply disappears. To prevent the OS from hiding Emcee entirely, it adapts its content based on the available space. For example, if the both the artist and the track name don’t fit, Emcee only shows the track name; if it still doesn’t fit, Emcee would at least show its icon.

Ventura sadly no longer lets menu items adapt their content based on free space in the menu bar, so Emcee was always just showing its icon. In the new version, we no longer try to adapt the content in Ventura, so if it doesn’t fit, it disappears entirely. In older macOS versions the behavior is unchanged.

We’ve also updated the app’s icon.