Hypercritical

Automobiles have been around for well over a century.

I spend a lot of time thinking about what Apple should be doing differently.

Mac users of a certain age may remember Ambrosia Software, maker of iconic shareware hits like Maelstrom and Escape Velocity.

Two months ago, I launched Hyperspace, a Mac app for reclaiming disk space without removing files.

Love, Death & Robots is an animated anthology series on Netflix.

My interest in file systems started when I discovered how type and creator codes1 and resource forks contributed to the fantastic user interface on my original Macintosh in 1984.

The recent Beeper controversy briefly brought the “blue bubbles vs. green bubbles” topic back into the mainstream.

The graphical user interface on the original Macintosh was a revelation to me when I first used it at the tender age of 8 years old.

While the utility of Generative AI is very clear at this point, the moral, ethical, and legal questions surrounding it are decidedly less so.

I first read about the “blue ocean” strategy in a story (probably in Edge magazine) about the Nintendo Wii.

“The Plumber Problem” is a phrase I coined to describe the experience of watching a movie that touches on some subject area that you know way more about than the average person, and then some inaccuracy in what’s depicted distracts you and takes you out of

It is said that every five years, Hypercritical t-shirts return.

I’m part of the MTV generation.

SwitchGlass 2.0, the first major update to my customizable app switcher for macOS, is now available on the Mac App Store.

In the Spring of 2019, I was looking for a way to promote one of our time-limited merchandise sales for Accidental Tech Podcast.

When I graduated college in 1997, I started a full-time job with the same dot-com startup that I had been working for part time during my senior year.

My unsolicited streaming app spec has garnered a lot of feedback.

I subscribe to a lot of streaming video services, and that means I use a lot of streaming video apps.

Thanks to either my opinionated nature or the fact that I have voiced my opinions on various podcasts for years, people often ask me to recommend products.

Ever since the story broke, I’ve had one overriding thought about the Hey.com App Store rejection controversy.

When DragThing was finally left behind—after 24 years of service—by macOS Catalina’s lack of support for 32-bit apps, I knew I’d miss many of its features.

For a few years now, I’ve tracked the TV shows I’m watching using the iOS app Couchy, which integrates with the Trakt.tv service.

By the time Mac OS X was first released in 2001, I had been using what would eventually be known as “classic” Mac OS for seventeen years.

The upcoming sequel to the 1986 classic Top Gun has reminded me of a favorite memory from my youth.

According to any reasonable set of quantifiable measures, Jony Ive departs Apple as the greatest product designer who has ever lived.

These are some of my favorite video games.

Five years ago, I sold t-shirts commemorating my first podcast, Hypercritical, which ran for 100 episodes in 2011–2012.

Fumito Ueda’s first game, Ico, was a beautiful, moody masterpiece.

These are the canonical bagel flavors: Plain Poppy Sesame Egg Cinnamon Raisin Everything Egg Everything Onion Salt Pumpernickel Also: Bialys

Nearly 15 years ago, I wrote my first review of Mac OS X for a nascent “PC enthusiast’s" website called Ars Technica.

I reviewed OS X 10.10 Yosemite for Ars Technica.

Most of the nonfiction books I read these days fall into two broad categories: books about people I admire and books about the creation of things I admire.

Thirty years ago today, Steve Jobs introduced Macintosh.

Ask a room of computer geeks how they came to deserve this appellation and you’ll likely hear many similar stories.

At the beginning of last year, I posted a list of things Apple can and should do during 2013.

On two recent episodes of Accidental Tech Podcast, I talked about calibrating my new TV.

I reviewed OS X 10.9 Mavericks for Ars Technica.

When Apple was on the ropes sixteen years ago, there was no shortage of advice about what the company should do to save itself, much of it fueled by a deep love for Apple’s products.

Hypercritical t-shirts 2.0, clockwise from the top-left: Silver, Gold, Black, and Navy.

Now that the Xbox One has been revealed, joining the already-released Wii U and the previously announced PlayStation 4, we can finally get a sense of what the next generation of game consoles will look like.

Hypercritical t-shirts, clockwise from the top-left: Silver, Gold, Black, and Navy.

The prevailing wisdom about software design at Apple is that the pendulum has swung too far in the direction of simulated real-world materials, slavish imitation of physical devices, and other skeuomorphic design elements, producing a recent crop of appli…

In a recent podcast, I rejected the idea of a lottery system for selling WWDC tickets as too random.

When Apple decided to make its own web browser back in 2001, it chose KHTML/KJS from the KDE project as the basis of its rendering engine.

Technology can be a surprisingly ideological topic.

The mobile market, everyone agrees, is the technology industry’s future.

The xMac has been back in the news lately—the idea, if not necessarily the name.

I must confess, I was neither surprised nor disturbed by last month’s announcement that the Opera web browser was switching to the WebKit rendering engine.

I’ve been watching House of Cards, the new TV series available exclusively on Netflix, which reportedly outbid HBO, Showtime, and others for the rights to the show.

The iPhone 5 caught some flak for being “too light.”