Anyone using old computers for graphics remembers the strangeness of “flood fill”:

The 1950s and 1960s computers were so sluggish that their consoles with blinking lights were not just for show; the operations were slow enough that you could still follow the lights in real time.

This ceased to be true soon afterwards. The microcomputer revolution temporarily reset some computing progress, but by the 1980s and 1990s more and more things were happening too fast for us to keep up.

But here (this above is Paint in Windows 1.0, and you can try for yourself in a browser!) was one example where you could still see an algorithm working hard. It was mesmerizing and educational, and it was a rare example where perhaps you didn’t mind the computer taking its sweet time. Even messing up like I did above – maybe especially messing up – ended up fascinating to watch.

Wikipedia has examples of a few different flood fill algorithms, which are even more interesting:

A few years later, Minesweeper had a very memorable flood fill, too (also available in a web emulator today):

But by now Minesweeper retired from sweeping mines, and today computers are so fast that it’s hard for me to imagine any flood fill being anything else but flash flood…

…except this is what I just saw in Pixelmator on my Mac:

I don’t know if this is a nod toward a classic flood fill, or just a nice unrelated transition. But I found it genuinely delightful, and it’s fast enough that I would imagine it doesn’t bother pros who need to do it often.

Sometimes it’s nice to see a computer working when there’s a good reason; some apps like banking apps even insert artificial, visible delays after crucial operations, just so that the users feel comfortable knowing their important transaction went through.

But sometimes it’s nice to see a computer working for no reason at all.

As a Mac user I naturally focus on that platform, but Windows 11 has had its own share of problems – and that list has grown so vast it’s hard to know where to start.

So let’s pick it up at random, with a post by Thom Holwerda with a great title “You can actually stop Windows Explorer from flashbanging you in dark mode”:

One of the most annoying things I encountered while trying out Windows 11 a few months ago was the utterly broken dark mode; broken since its inception nine years ago, but finally getting some fixes. One of the smaller but downright disturbing issues with dark mode on Windows 11 is that when Explorer is in dark mode, it will flash bright white whenever you open a new window or a new tab. It’s like the operating system is throwing flashbangs at you every time you need to do some file management.

I find the videogame-inspired nickname darkly – I’m sorry! – funny, but the problem is real. It looks like this (video via windowscentral.com):

It’s not a problem unique to Windows 11 – just the other night I saw this on Wikipedia on my iPhone, exacerbated by the delayed reaction of Liquid Glass buttons spastically adapting to the changing background:

But there is something about this that feels a notch more important than other visual and layout issues.

I think this is because dark mode is a contract – we’ll lower the brightness, and we’ll let your eyes rest. There’s a physiological part to it: a sudden flash of light when your eyes are not expecting to it can be actually physically painful. I think it’s worth thinking about it and futureproofing and sanding dark-mode views especially at their edges: loading states, error messages, signing in and logging off areas. The “flashbang” analogy is very apt, and especially so on bigger screens.

I spend a lot of time at work thinking and designing (and avoiding) loading states, and someone just reminded me of a piece I wrote ten years ago, so I just moved it from Medium to my new website, and updated with new things I learned.

It’s about TV clock idents and what they meant to me growing up – possibly the original “loading state” in my life.

Of course, really, nothing compares to the absolutely banging BBC News “loading state”, which is fantastic, infinitely memeable, and brilliant even before you realize it cleverly incorporates the historical Greenwich Time Signal in it in a way that absolutely gives me chills.

Best comment under that BBC News theme: “As a swiss, this makes me proud to be british.”

What is it about Brits and extraordinarily perfectly timed music? Here’s Pet Shop Boys and Casting a shadow, made especially for and matching the total solar eclipse in 2000 to within half a second.

An absolutely eviscerating 18-minute walkthrough of Apple Music for macOS Catalina, from a few years ago. More funny than anything else, but a reminder to test the “boring” edges of your app – like a state with a lapsed subscription, or coming back after a few months.

There’s no way to drag and drop. […] If I want to add this to here, I have to go through this bullshit, and when I do, it takes seconds again.

Also, an ode to a well-functioning back button, and well-behaving loading states. Those things add up so quickly.

(My debugging brain understood what populated the confusing History entries – I bet it was the early play sequences that went through a bunch of stuff without playing.)