Dan Bricklin @danb@qoto.org

The Mac calculator’s original design came from letting Steve Jobs play with sliders for ten minutes
In 1982, a young Mac developer turned Jobs into a UI designer—and accidentally invented a new technique.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/11/the-mac-calculators-original-design-came-from-letting-steve-jobs-play-with-sliders-for-ten-minutes/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

@danb @_Davidsmith Thanks, Dan. Means a lot coming from you!

@danb 💙 So glad to hear it was helpful.

visionOS 26.2 marks a bunch of the Apple Pencil APIs as now available on visionOS. So either Logi Muse is going to actually support PencilKit, or Apple has Pencil (or Marker) support in the works

I was interviewed for the Learning from Machine Learning podcast. I'm really happy with how it turned out. (They edited it well to make me sound coherent.) "Lessons from Building the First Killer App" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xd851lIutbQ and https://rss.com/podcasts/learning-from-machine-learning/2275047/

Five years ago, today, a TikTok video changed my life.

While Widgetsmith launched on Sep 16, 2020, it wasn't until the 18th when it had its viral moment on TikTok and meteoric rise to the top of the App Store.

I wanted to observe the occasion with a little retrospective of my memories from that day and the journey to it.

Little did I know then that my professional life would become helping millions of people make their home screens “Aesthetic AF”.

(131M so far[!])

https://david-smith.org/blog/2025/09/18/widgetsmith-at-five/

'Real artists ship' is a surprisingly effective motivator, and an important forcing function. Sometimes I just get so fed up of looking at an unshipped Xcode project that I'm compelled to pull out all the stops to push it out the door. If you don't ship, you never learn and grow

I know we bore everyone with old timer computing talk, but if we hadn't slogged through all that stuff decades ago, none of us would be here now.

Mixing the audio for "Jeopardy!" -- this guy's great! One of a series of videos on this channel about audio for various major live television shows, including SNL. - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FqkeEhtrQc

@danb the pen support is awesome but leaves me wondering why Apple Pencil Pro is not! You’d think they added all those new motion sensors for more than just rendering shadows on an iPad screen. Maybe software not there yet. Maybe it will need a new pencil hardware. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

@danb I borrowed an original Mac from the local Apple store and brought to my computer science class to try it out.

We were excited, and everyone was clustered tightly around to see what it could do.

I opened MacPaint and drew a circle.

Will never forget the simultaneous "whoa!" from me and every single student in the room.

@danb Thank you! Thank you!

Watching this, I can feel my original sense of amazement. I can feel myself wanting to play with my own Mac.

Work got fun again.

It is so moving to watch a high point of the life of someone who changed the world in a way that enriched the lives of so many. The audience reaction (of techies who know they are watching an historic milestone) lets you feel it. #billatkinson

Here’s Bill Atkinson (and rest of team) answering questions right after the Macintosh was debuted at the Boston Computer Society in 1984: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tQ5XwvjPmA starting at 28:25 - he demos MacPaint and more. May his memory be a blessing!

@danb oh thanks for posting that, amazing piece of history.

@danb I thought I was going to scrub to the Atkinson bit. Instead was rapt for the full hour and twenty minutes. What an amazing team.