Jim Nielsen’s Blog

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 t…

I’ve mentioned before my interest in the history and development of nuclear weapons.

Have you heard the good news?

From where I sit, figuring out what to build, building it, and shipping it are all part of the art of making software.

I wrote the chapter on app icon history for The iOS App Icon Book.

Pete Millspaugh has a lovely article over on WIRED that peers into the world of domains.

My notes from this talk by Alexander Petros at Big Sky DevCon 2026.

Louie Mantia has a great post about how app icons are converging towards the squircle on iOS and macOS.

That’s something Ben Thompson said a recent episode of Dithering.

Marques Brownlee just released a video essay titled “Dear YouTube”.

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.

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.

Whenever a new version of macOS drops, I find myself archiving the new app icons for my macOS icon gallery.

I was listening to the episode “Make Your Own Thing” from the Off Protocol podcast where Jim Ray interviews John Gruber.

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%.

John Gruber makes his picks for the iPhone Hall of Fame: iPhone (original) iPhone 4 iPhone 5S iPhone X iPhone 17 Pro Ok, my turn.

“Artificial” things can get a bad rap next to their counterparts, but they have their place.

Poor bottlenecks.

I’ve got Netlify Analytics turned on for a few of my websites.

A URL is a technical thing: a hostname, a path, a port, an origin, some query parameters, etc.

Speaking of being on the internet and finding things that make you go, “Hey!

Marcin Wichary has a lovely article titled “Photoshop’s challenges with focus, pt. 2”.

I was reading Jason Gorman’s article “The Wall Confronting Reliable Coding Agent Autonomy” and he says: the journey from 90% to 99% reliability is just as hard as it was to get to 90%.

Speaking of things we know individually, but let slide collectively, here’s Jeremy Keith talking about how we all used Flash: Remember when almost every website had a Flash intro?

Eric Bailey has a fun little post about how we need more than a few icons to express the nuance of our shared human experience.

807 blog posts across 14 years.

Dave Rupert wrote about shipping microlighter: a tool for handling syntax highlighting using the CSS Custom Highlights API.

On my icon gallery sites, I have metadata I’ve manually added over the years to tag certain icons as being predominantly “blue” or “orange” or some other color.

In his talk “Why AI Is Breaking Software Security As We Know It” (my notes here), Feross Aboukhadijeh talks about the Axios npm incident and how the maintainer got phished by succumbing to (amongst other things) a faux Microsoft Teams interface: this is t…