It took little under a decade for the headline feature developer Jon Skinner added to Sublime Text’s second version to become one of the defining features of this decade’s software.
“Goto Anything” is how it started, a search pane to jump to other files. Open a folder, press CMD/Ctrl+P, start typing to see a list of matching files, then press Enter to jump to it. Seems simple enough: You think of a file you need, and without leaving the keyboard can switch to that file and continue work.
Within months, that search pane gained a companion: The now-famous Command Palette. “The Command Palette provides a quick way to access commands that don't warrant a key binding, and would usually be hidden away in a menu,” explained Skinner. This time, you’d press CMD/Ctrl+Shift+P and get a search bar, only here you’d search through program features.
Type Save to find the Save as… command without looking through the File menu. Type Theme to change your text colors without clicking. With the Package Manager plugin, you could browse Sublime Text add-ons and install them, like a mini keyboard-powered App Store.
Compared to clicking each menu looking for a command, or hovering over every button in a toolbar, waiting for its tooltip to flash for a second with a hint of what it does, the Command Palette felt like magic. Tell the program what you wanted to do, and it’d do it. It was search that worked for you, a terminal you wanted to use.
It was the interface computers had needed all along.
Hide and seek.
Typing into blank boxes is how personal computing started. The earliest Apple computers and PCs started with a command prompt, a C:\\ >_ waiting at your command.
Enter dir to browse files, type to view a text file, and so on. Easy enough if you remembered a command, equally easy to mess everything up if you manage to type format or rm -rf in Unix.
Thus, toolbars and menus, the graphical user interface that made computers approachable. “People need to feel that they can try things without damaging the system,” recommended Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines, the software design handbook for the Macintosh.
Floppy disk and trash can icons made computers feel understandable, approachable even. As Netscape founder Marc Andreessen said in a demo of the earlier Mosaic web browser, “Instead of having to actually use cryptic commands... you can just point and click on things you're interested in.” It was decades before smartphones would make software something you could actually touch and manipulate, but the mouse was close enough. We could figure this out.
Figure out, though, often meant trial and error. Computing replaced the terror of the blank page with the thrill of clicking an unknown button. Windows 95’s Minesweeper became the perfect analogy for toolbar buttons, where behind each button might lay a bomb.
It was manageable at first, with merely 19 buttons in WordPad and 20 in MacPaint. But the 75 unlabeled buttons in recent versions of Photoshop are a digital minefield that take years to learn. They keep people from trying out new software, make developers default to their old terminal habits instead of playing button roulette.
“Personal computers are just too hard to use, and it’s not your fault,” opened tech journalist Walt Mossberg’s first column in 1991. Despite designers’ best intentions, that same feeling still rang true a decade later.
When search started working.
If searching for the right button wasn’t hard enough, finding files wasn’t much easier. You could click through folders if you took the time to organize, but if you saved everything to your desktop, finding document187.doc was an exercise in frustration at best, slow enough that Windows XP’s search box included an animated dog to keep you company while you waited.
But as annoying as desktop search was at the time, it hinted at how computing should be. After all, Google could find anything on the web faster than you could find stuff on your own computer. What if you could just tell your computer what you wanted, and it’d find and run it?
Then Google came to the desktop, with a tool in 2004 to search the web or your computer for files and programs in a keystroke. Suddenly we’d come full circle. The fastest way to launch programs was to type their name into a box, only a box that looked a bit more stylish than the terminal of old.
Suddenly search was everywhere.
2007 was quite the year for search. It’s when Excel gained Formula AutoComplete (as surprising as it seems that it wasn’t included all along), so you could start typing and Excel would suggest the formula you likely wanted. It’s when Visual Studio also got a file search box that doubled as a command prompt. Two years earlier, Apple had added Spotlight to the Mac (the same search tool build into your iPhone today), but it’s what Apple added to the Mac’s search in 2007 that moved search forward.
Hidden in the release notes of OS X Leopard was Help Menu Search. “A new search field in the Help menu displays all relevant menu items in the active application,” explained Apple, Spotlight for all your software features. Click help, start typing, and you could find the command you need in seconds, no trial and error required. Suddenly Photoshop’s Crop tool or Excel’s Replace function and every other hidden software feature were easy to find.
Spotlight itself feels like a modern command line. Type an app name to launch it, 3+5 to see its sum, $25 in Euro to convert currency, and more. Paired with search inside your app’s features, you had the best of the terminal paired with the best of graphical interfaces.
Buttons and menus, after all, have text describing their functions. Add search and suddenly everything was more discoverable, no cryptic commands or oddly shortened words like dir needed. Menu items and button tooltips use real words, after all, the terms you’d use to describe them in real life. Search those words and you’d find the tool you need.
Taking shortcuts.
There was an easier way all along: Keyboard shortcuts, where you’d press CMD or Ctrl+C to copy and so on.
They're faster, for sure. “Keyboard is by far the most efficient way to navigate and control modern digital technology 90% of the time,” said @Blakejmyer in a Capiche discussion about keyboard shortcuts. “Super users are keyboard only.” As engineer coach @MorganJLopes said, “The efficiency of navigating a computer without shifting hand position compounds over time.”
“A mouse is okay for browsing the web, but for getting working done I prefer a keyboard.” @ahubbs. As @AndrewPenry said, “You can't beat the speed of not moving your hands to another device or to touch the screen.”
The problem they're like magic incantations, secret codes passed down from computer classes and textbooks, not the things you’d discover on your own. “Once you know what you're doing, the keyboard is much faster for things you do all the time,” said @dharmesh. But you've got to know what you're doing first.
“If you don’t know a shortcut, how do you look it up? And if you don't know a feature exists, how do you find it?,” mused Superhuman founder Rahul Vohra in an email conversation about command palettes.
Enter the command palette.
Early text editors like Vim took the command line approach, with commands such as :wq to save your work and quit the program. They’re fast to use once you learn them—but you have to learn them in the first place.
Thus the genius of the command palette in Sublime Text—and its early predecessor in the Mac’s help menu search. You don’t have to learn what to press or even know what to look for. Just type and get the feature you need.
What makes a command palette?
“A command palette has quite a few parts,” said Vohra:
“A single shortcut to invoke the palette
A fuzzy matcher to find commands
A way to see the direct shortcuts for next time”
Height project management app founder Michael Villar said something similar. “There are a bunch of reasons why a command palette is interesting: it makes features completely accessible from the keyboard and discoverable in a standardized UI, makes shortcuts findable, and hides the underlying complexity behind a piece of software.”
So when the Superhuman team set out to make a more efficient email experience, they knew keyboard shortcuts would speed you up and search was critical to the email experience. “And then it struck us,” said Vohra: “the answer was staring right at us in our text editor.” Sublime Text’s command palette took a single shortcut to open, matched what you typed to the commands, and showed shortcuts so you could remember next time. Superhuman brought the same to email.
The Mac’s menu search inspired other developers to build similar tools. When iA Writer developer Oliver Reichenstein was asked about the inspiration for their iPhone app’s search that combines file and feature search in one dialog, he starts: “Well, in Help…”
The team behind writing app Ulysses skipped feature search, but still says their in-app search was inspired by Spotlight. “We took the elements we liked, a shortcut, quick entry, simple result preview and selection, and built our own mini-version of this search into the app,” said Ulysses co-founder Max Seelemann.
And some found inspiration even further back, in the terminal. As Alfred search tool co-founder Vero Pepperrell said when asked where they’d first encountered a command palette, “Using a command line was the original way you'd interact with any computer.” It just took some refinement and polish to make them usable by everyone.
“Command palettes are a vastly superior UI than point-and-click and can democratize the speed engineers experience in our editors,” said Command E founder Tom Uebel. Developers had long experienced their simplicity, perfect over generations in Terminal, Vim, Visual Studio, Sublime Text, and their successors. Power users discovered them in the Mac’s help search.
And now they’re everywhere.
Photoshop has a command palette hidden in its search tool, added in 2017 as a way to both search for stock media and to sort through the vast array of features in the photo editor. Microsoft Office has a command palette, in the top of the ribbon where the “Tell me what to do” box lets you search for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint features with a click or a press of Alt+Q. Notion changed the idea a bit, put its core tools behind a / menu, where you type a slash then continue typing to find the tool you want. Nuclino, a team notes tool, and Deepnote, a data science tool, are among the new apps that are built around command palettes. They went from being a headline new feature to something you should almost expect new software will have.
Computers without screens.
When computer scientist Alan Kay laid out his vision for computers, he among other rules the following:
“The service must not be esoteric to use. (It must be learnable in private.)”
Terminals, unlabeled buttons, and keyboard shortcuts never quite hit that. We could learn them in private, sure, but they definitely were esoteric to use, at first anyhow. It took combining a few things from each into a search bar to get a new feature that could turn everyone into power users.
Then as soon as it came to desktop software, the search bar disappeared again in the newest devices. Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant all are essentially command palettes, activated by voice with no interface to see. Hey Siri, what's the weather? or Alexa, turn off living room lights or Ok Google, find directions to the airport, and it is so.
“People need to feel that they can try things without damaging the system,” said Apple’s Human Interface Guide, and the ease at which children learn to interact via voice perhaps means voice assistants at least have got the no-fear-of-damaging-the-system right.
Maybe Siri’s a command palette when we don’t want to type—and real command palettes are the way to simplify work the rest of the time. Maybe the future’s less about looking for the tool we need, and more telling computers exactly what we need, and it actually working.
Originally published on the now-defunct Capiche blog on February 21, 2020.
Apps in a browser weren't enough. Collaboration and cross-platform development made the difference.
When Google launched their online office suite with Docs and Sheets in 2006, feature parity with Microsoft Office wasn't the focus. Neither was a price tag of free, or cross-platform support by virtue of being a web app. Instead, Google focused on the pain of emailing documents back and forth to collaborate, then trying to merge everyone's edits.
"We made a deliberate bet that users would want speed, convenience and collaborative features enough that we could ignore richer functionality like rich formatting, margins, pagination, etc," Google Docs née Writely creator Sam Schillace told The Verge in 2013. Google Docs wasn’t better than Word, and users were perhaps not be thrilled that it only ran in their browser—but better collaboration features and being able to open your documents anywhere would more than make up for it, or so bet the Google team.
The story played out over and again as apps became the new leaders in their fields, or created entirely new categories. Often they were web apps, the easiest way to ship software that works on every platform from day one. But web apps were a means, not an end—as was their often low entry price of free.
What mattered were better features.
Web Apps for a Reason
For a brief window in the late 2000's, everything would be a web app, or so it seemed. Aviary and Pixlr aimed to replace Photoshop in the browser, CodeIDE and Cloud9 moved software development online, and apps like Jolicloud and Nvivo tried to recreate the desktop as a web app (the former as a new app, the latter as real Windows, but online). Microsoft even got in on the action with Windows Live Desktop, complete with a start menu. Web apps were built simply to have apps in the browser.
Customers shrugged, and went on using Photoshop, Sublime Text, and the desktop that came with their computer.
At the end of the decade that brought us Gmail, Google Docs, GitHub, Facebook, and Twitter, enough of our lives had moved into the browser that it seemed everything would. The increasing popularity of Macs in the workplace along with early mobile devices meant that being cross-platform should give web apps a strong advantage. And in the rush to go online, web apps hit the peak of inflated expectations in Gartner’s hype cycle—only to quickly hit the trough of disillusionment.
Web apps didn’t work when you were offline. They loaded slower than native apps, and often had fewer features. Free was nice, but working consistently was nicer. And the then-new mobile app stores made native apps all the more appealing.
Technology often starts out as an exciting new idea that's quickly iterated upon, enough to produce a bubble of exciting new things that use the new tech for tech’s sake. That’s a recipe for disappointment. Customers may get caught up in the buzz of new features, but in the long term they won’t buy tech simply because it’s new (sorry, 3D TVs). They don’t care that apps are coded in today’s fanciest frameworks, that they’re web apps or native apps or Electron in-betweens. They care, solely, that the app works, that it does what they need effectively and better than anything else. And they won’t switch to something new unless it is better at something they need.
In Gartner’s telling, it takes a “slope of enlightenment” of what new tech can uniquely do and how to use that to build better products, before new tech finally reaches a plateau of productivity.
For web apps, that enlightenment was collaboration and cross-platform apps.
Apps for Collaboration
In the rush to build early web apps, the critical yet often overlooked question was why. Free isn’t necessarily a reason to use a web app; after all, GIMP and OpenOffice have for decades been free alternatives to some of the best selling desktop software. Neither was simply being a cross-platform app enough on its own, when many desktop applications also had Mac and Windows editions. It takes something more to convince people to use a product that often, especially at launch, has fewer features than its legacy competitors.
The secret was hidden in plain view all along. Google Docs’ launch post accepted that their product wouldn’t include everything Word offered. Instead, Google Docs would add "collaboration ... to the productivity options people already enjoy."
Better for one specific need, one thing the platform was uniquely better at—and not better at everything. Even today, if you need advanced page layout tools or want to crunch millions of values in a detailed spreadsheet, you'd likely reach for Microsoft's desktop Office apps instead. But for real-time collaboration—even on text that doesn't exactly fit Google Docs' page design, such as a blog post or speech script—you'll likely reach for Google Docs with its superior versioning and commenting system.
The same inspiration fueled Figma, the design app that is quickly replacing the combination of Sketch or InDesign plus InVision. Their original plan to simply build “Photoshop in the browser” was quickly scuttled. Their app needed a reason, a purpose.
"Even though design is inherently collaborative, popular design tools were single-player and offline at the time," said founder Dylan Field in an interview last year. That was the reason: Make it easier to collaborate on designs, and you wouldn't care if the app only worked online and didn't have feature parity with other design apps. Design and photo editing in the browser wasn’t interesting if it didn’t bring anything new to the game. Collaboration itself made Figma better.
So it goes for Slack making team chat more fun and fluid, for Airtable helping the ghost of Microsoft Access escape the desktop, for Soundtrap finally providing an alternative to GarageBand. They were all built for community, with collaboration as the default. They were designed around the web’s always-on assumption where software can do things while you sleep. That gave us a reason to switch, even to pay for something that replaced a tool we'd already owned.
New web apps were better than what came before, specifically at collaboration. It wasn’t where the apps ran that mattered, it’s what they enabled. You didn’t care if a feature was missing, when the app let your team work together in ways you never could before.
The Right Platform for the Job
For software developers, perhaps the greatest appeal of web apps was building software for every platform with the same code. Write once, run anywhere. But web apps, by virtue of being in the browser, often were slower especially on congested internet connections. That made them feel unreliable; what would happen if your internet went down? And by being simply another browser tab, they were far more forgettable than software in the dock or taskbar every time you opened your computer.
Then in 2013 the GitHub team released Electron, a framework to turn HTML, CSS, and other web technologies into native-seeming Windows, Mac, and Linux apps, and changed that equation. Instead of web apps feeling out of place among other installed apps on your computer, Electron promised the code once, run anywhere dream—and delivered. You could code an app using web technology once, and turn it into a cross-platform app that felt equally at home on all computers. Electron apps ran offline, but could still include web components to keep data synced.
“Building native apps for multiple platforms doesn’t scale,” wrote the GitHub team on launching their Electron-powered desktop app. “The web isn’t a perfect platform, but native apps aren’t built on perfect platforms either.” At the very least, though, web technologies run everywhere, and fit well into the continuous development model where new features and bug fixes are released in near real time.
Electron helped bring apps to the desktop that might have otherwise stayed in the browser. It’s the main reason that new apps today tend to support Mac and Windows from day one. From new apps like Slack, Notion, Airtable, Superhuman, MeisterTask, and Abstract to new versions of legacy software such as QuickBooks, Electron powered apps are everywhere today. They’re built with web code—the same HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that power web apps in your browser—even when they require a download to run.
Even still, everything doesn't work better as a web app. Google Hangouts is perhaps the best thing to come from the search giant’s attempt to build a social network, yet if anything it feels held back by being a web app. Hangouts only supports Chrome, and has a maddening tendency to burn through your laptop battery and drop calls when the internet’s less than perfect.
Zoom met the challenge with desktop and mobile apps, paired with a lower quality web app if needed. It was a seemingly backwards step from the web-first Hangouts. And yet, Zoom’s native apps did so much better at streaming video calls, at keeping you connected despite your connection quality, that people switched to Zoom en masse.
"I often met with customers, and in my conversations with them learned they weren’t happy with the current collaboration solutions, including WebEx. I firmly believed I could develop a platform that would make customers happy," said founder Eric Yuan. Him, included, after experiencing the pain of spotty video calls during a long-distance relationship. "So how do we win? We care," Yuan told Inc. Magazine.
Caring about the little things means picking the platform and app style that delivers those things best. Web tech might make development better; platform-native features make users happy. For the popular new email app Superhuman, nailing both meant throwing away some of the default assumptions about web apps.
“Everyone assumed you’re in a browser tab, so clearly the service should store the email, the service should do the search, and the service should work like Gmail,” founder Rahul Vohra told TechCrunch. Instead, they designed their app to store emails locally, and be as fast as possible—two things typically seen as desktop app advantages.
“We decided it would be blazingly fast; it would be visually gorgeous; the whole thing would work offline; you wouldn’t need a multitude of browser extensions to get things done; and people would be materially faster at doing their email," said Vohra.
Vohra’s previous app, Rapportive (now LinkedIn Sales Navigator), was an email add-on to surface new info about your contacts. As such, its ideal platform was as a Chrome add-on so it could work inside Gmail. A pure web app wouldn’t have worked. Now with Superhuman, a new take on a web app along with native mobile apps makes the most sense—enough that people are willing to pay far above the market average for a better email experience. It’s a web native hybrid that’s increasingly how newer apps are built.
Yesterday’s Constraints are Today’s Opportunities
Everything still isn’t a web app, even a hybrid one—nor could all software reasonably be replaced by one. Survey people about their critical software on or check the App Store top downloads section, and you’ll find hundreds of reasons why we still need Macs and PCs to get work done.
Most obvious are utilities that tie into your system and help you across all your apps. Terminals, text expanders, backup utilities, file managers, automation tools, and more all fit here. They can’t be isolated in a browser window and need to work closer to your operating system—and are both the best argument against switching to a Chromebook or iPad for work and the best example of apps that are unlikely to become web apps.
Things that rely on your device’s hardware are another broad category best for native apps. Camera and motion-sensing apps on mobile, design tools that rely on external drawing pads, virtual machines to run other operating systems and test or isolate applications, and video games that use video cards to generate realistic graphics are all things built around the best of your device. You want those to use your device’s local power, something web apps are generally designed to avoid.
Bandwidth constraints have eased over the years as our internet connections have become progressively faster—but still, local hard drives are still far faster than your internet connection, much less newer solid state drives. When you’re cataloging photos, editing video into a movie, compiling code into a new app, and more, you want fast storage and a faster machine to cut through your work.
The apps that keep many of us attached to our Macs and PCs are often those that work better without being a web app, from utilities like text expander, file managers, and terminals to advanced video editing and CAD software. Perhaps they don’t need to be.
Or perhaps, someone will rethink those things with the best of the web, with its collaborative foundation in mind, and reinvent what we think software can be. Web apps today—as Progressive Web Apps—can work offline, use your device’s sensors, store as much data as needed locally, send push notifications, and hide the browser UI to feel more like a native device. And thanks to faster internet, make things like streaming video games and remote desktops feel nearly as smooth as running them locally.
The discarded web app ideas of yesterday suddenly might make sense. Replacing Illustrator with a web app might have seemed preposterous even a decade ago, or building a faster email app than Gmail. Figma and Superhuman proved otherwise, proved we’d line up and pay to switch to a web app if it actually did things better—while Zoom and every new native app in the App Store proves again that the best apps are designed around their platform’s best strengths, and that even today everything isn’t quite meant to be a web app.
Image Credits: Gartner Hype Cycle graph via Wikipedia.
Originally published on the now-defunct Capiche blog on November 5, 2019.
This is the best thing you could buy, promises the internet, the holy grail, the be all end all, everything you’ve ever wanted. This product does everything at once—or maybe it only does one thing, but it does that task better than anything ever did it before.
You don’t have time or budget to try all the things; no one does. So you have two choices: Trust the wisdom of the crowd and buy the most popular thing, or check reviews and roundups of the best items in a category. Reviews are Google gold for blogs, productive-feeling entertainment as if researching the thing that will make us productive is actually productive.
And it’s not like the writers are terrible, the reviews misinformed, or the ratings skewed. Sure there’s junk online, but there’s also lots of great info. Pick a trusted publication and buy a “best” item from their list, and you’ll get something that meets what their criteria for what makes something best.
But what do you need?
You don’t need the best widget. You need the widget that does the one task you need.
You don’t need a social media management application; you need to schedule Tweets. You don’t need a form builder; you need to survey your audience and easily see their favorite option. You don’t need a word processor; you need to share your copy and get feedback.
You don’t need software. You need to accomplish a task.
Thus the adage that 80% of people only use 20% of a product’s features, taken from Standish Group research into software dating back to 1996. That was for custom, in-house software. For “package applications” such as Microsoft Office, it’s even worse—less than 5% of features are often used.
Here’s the catch: You’re not everyone. You’re you, and one person’s needless feature is another’s treasure. You might need that one specific feature that only 1% of people use—but it’s the critical reason you chose that specific piece of software.
Broad categories obscure that. It’s easy to say something's the best office suite or CRM or project management tool, based on sales records and industry accolades. It’s far harder to drill down and find what’s best at the specific thing you need.
No one’s lying. Each person shared what they feel is the best program, with facts to back them up. And you know what? They’re right.
Take Google’s Docs word processor, for example. Google claimed over a billion people use Google Drive in 2018 after Microsoft claimed 1.2 billion users for its competing Microsoft Office in 2016. It’s popular—perhaps not the most popular, but easily #2 if not. While Microsoft Word format is still required for so many government, educational, and corporate documents, it’s easy to imagine Word may still be more popular, but Google Docs is right up there.
But best? Google Docs has fewer features than Microsoft Word, an older interface than more buzzy writing software like Notion and even Microsoft’s OneNote, and is far less flexible for print layouts than publishing software. It’d be easy to poke holes in the argument that it’s the best word processor.
What’s not debatable is that Google Docs is best for collaboration. “Google Docs has great collaborative functionality,” said Spectrum Labs founder Jackson Moses. “The comments/assign feature is incredibly useful and being able to review historical changes saves a lot of time.”
HubSpot CTO Dharmesh Shah shared similar feelings about Google Docs: “Not as cool as the cool kids, but it works and it's helpful when collaborating with folks outside the org as well (pretty much everyone has access to Google Docs in some way).”
Perhaps it’s not best for everything, but for collaboration specifically—where anyone can edit your document and share suggested changes, and you can look back through the edits easily—Google Docs is best. When you need to collaborate on documents, it’s the tool you pick not because its best, but because it’s best at that specific feature.
The iPhone wasn’t objectively the best phone at launch, in a “speeds and feeds” comparison of features. No copy/paste, no third-party software, no hardware keyboard, no front-facing camera, and no 3G. Yet it was best at the things that mattered: Web browsing and touch interface. Where touchscreens were clunky and required styli, the iPhone made it feel like you were touching software. And instead of basic mobile websites, you got the real internet in your pocket.
People chose it for the features they wanted most. Every other missing feature mattered far less for those customers.
When Salesforce entered the market as an early web app in late 1999, it wasn’t the most powerful or most feature-filled CRM. That crown went to software like Oracle and SAP. Salesforce’s winning feature was that it worked everywhere and didn’t require expensive in-house servers and maintenance. That feature was enough to turn Salesforce into the industry giant it is today—where now its killer feature is flexibility, something won by decades of iterative development. And rival HubSpot CRM’s core feature is that it’s free, which alone can be enough to cover a multitude of potential shortcomings.
Best is subjective, something everything from movie ratings to bestseller lists should teach us. We want the best—but maybe there’s no absolute best. As Shopify content strategist and writer Owen Williams recently wrote about gadgets, “finding one ‘best’ option for everyone might not actually be possible.”
And so it goes with software.
Is Sketch or Figma the best design tool today? “We've just moved from @sketch to @figmadesign at @Smarkup because of collaboration and scalability,” shared @adsabla, while @brendanciccone countered the opposite, saying “The reason I prefer Sketch is that I don't like people looking over my shoulder while I'm in design mode and seeing multiple people inside the document I'm working on just makes me feel anxious and less inspired to experiment.” Collaboration mattered to one, privacy to another, both key features that made one product best for different people.
There’s no best software. Some products have better specific features than others, though, and those tiny tools make us productive and help us get our jobs done.
Don’t waste your time looking for the perfect software. Find instead something that has features and tools you need. It might not be the coolest app, and might be worse for every other use case. Perfect; those are the 80% of the features you don’t need.
I have a love/hate relationship with phone cases. I loved the original Apple leather cases; on the iPhone X, with its curved glass edge and the gap at the bottom of the screen, with leather that patinated over time, the leather case felt like a nice addition to the phone. It felt nice in the case, nice out of the case, and both made sense depending on the situation. I never could love the iPhone 13 Pro's leather case as much, with its sharper edges that were more prone to wear and that added a bump to the bottom of the screen right where you swipe up to go home.
And so, increasingly, I used my phone caseless. Living dangerously, I know, and yet it feels nicer in hand, and I grew accustomed to the somewhat-slimmer form factor without a case. The first year of my iPhone 13 Pro's life, it lived mostly in a case. The remaining three plus years, caseless.
I expected it to accumulate its share of scratches and the occasional dent. I didn't expect it to somehow go through a natural bluing process, though. Yet that's what seems to have happened.
Whether through heat (I always felt like it ran hotter than previous iPhones, especially when on 2 bars of cellular connection—even if on Wi-fi—or with the default sim and an eSim enabled), or through some interaction of the stainless steel with my hand, my black (officially, "Graphite") iPhone 13 over time took on a blue sheen that looks for all the world like a heat-driven bluing.
The color was the most prominent on the lower parts of the phone, less-so near the top, leading credence to my theory of it being touch-related. The sim card tray and buttons were unaffected.
In some ways, Apple's choice of color for this model already had a hint of blue; the rear glass glowed a shade blue when the flashlight was turned on. Perhaps there was a hint of blue in the "Physical Vapor Deposition" process used to color the stainless steel that shone through as the upper layers wore off?
I liked the effect, though, and was somewhat sad to lose that patina when finally upgrading after 4+ years of service. It's not every day you get a uniquely colored phone, after all. And strangely there's my long-term review of the iPhone 13 Pro: It was a perfectly good phone that lasted well, got a bit warm, and changed colors over time. It never elicited any of the feelings that the iPhone X did—it was just another iPhone, that turned blue.
You could move SIM cards easily. You can move eSIMs almost as easily.
I ended 2025 by allaying a concern I’ve had as long as eSIMs have been around: eSIMs, it turns out, are reasonably easy to transfer to a new phone, even if you’re traveling.
Connect two phones to WiFi, open the new phone’s cellular settings, opt to add an eSIM, and choose to transfer an eSim from the nearby phone. iOS to iOS, that should involve only tapping a few on-screen confirmations; between iOS and Android, that may also involve scanning a QR code.
For a breathless moment, your older phone will lose cellular connection as its eSIM is deactivated (the eSIM can only be live and activated on a single phone at a time) and the newer phone will still not show connectivity as its eSIM is activating. Another moment, though, and your number will be safely transferred.
I’ve, for the past few years, had my primary number on a physical SIM, alongside a secondary eSIM for travel. And I’d always had this nagging concern about what’d happen if I upgraded phones. Would the travel eSIM carry over, even if I was outside of its region and could only make WiFi calls on that number?
I’m happy to report that transfer worked, for me. Your mileage may vary; Googling eSIM transfers reveals everything from people who routinely move eSIMs between daily and weekend devices (people who, clearly, worry far less than I do about something going wrong), and others who had to visit their carrier and go through a whole process. I maintain a mild, nagging question over how much control carriers have over your eSIM; it does seem that some carriers’ eSIMs move as they should, while others keep things more locked down.
But it is good to know that standard eSIM transfer was as easy as it could be. The loss of physicality isn’t the end of the world.
It’s not like SIM cards had any special place and purpose to most people. They’ve long been simultaneously one of the more hidden aspects of smartphones and one of their most important bits, the whole thing that makes them a phone instead of merely a pocket-sized computer. If you bought your phone through your carrier, have a monthly plan, and pay for roaming when traveling, odds are you haven’t thought about SIM cards in a while, if ever.
But in many places, SIM cards were as important a part of your mobile experience as charging cables and powerbanks. You might swap pre-paid SIMs to switch to a better deal, have a handful of local SIMs to use when traveling, or a work and personal SIM to maintain two personas on a single device. And, at the very least, if you dropped your phone down the stairs, or found that it’d died in its sleep one day, you might lose the data on your phone if you hadn’t backed up, but at least you could pop the SIM card out and revive your phone number moments later, anywhere in the world, without a trip to your carrier.
They’re weren’t perfect. You could lose your SIM card, and over time there was a chance you’d need a new physical card. Nothing lasts forever. Yet at least it felt like you had physical control over your phone number, your identity, that you could maintain multiple numbers and move around the world at will.
Along came eSIM, and that predictable portability was suddenly in question.
eSIMs are, in a way, to SIM cards what Apple Pay-style payment cards are to credit cards (which copies physical card data onto a chip in your phone, then uses it for payments via NFC the same way tap-to-pay works on a credit card). They’re a software copy of the same data that’d otherwise reside in a SIM card, stored in an eSIM-specific chip on your phone. And in many ways, that’s a better, more flexible system, as are most software replacements of hardware counterparts (think software alarm clocks with multiple alarms versus an alarm clock with its single timer). You can have multiple SIM cards, turning them on and off and will. You can add a new SIM card from an app or from a QR code, sprouting a new industry of travel-focused eSIMs.
And you can transfer eSIMs to a new phone—but here’s where the details get fuzzy.
For eSIMs aren’t software that you can move and backup at will. They’re not included in your iPhone’s iCloud backup. You can’t connect a phone to a computer, copy the eSIM data, and directly move it to another device. None of the data recovery tricks you know apply here. You can, however, transfer eSIMs directly between phones, trusting the software process with nothing you can control for a plan b if something breaks along the way.
It’d be reassuring if there was more certainty to it. If, as with two-factor codes, you could create a backup, perhaps a QR code with a pin number known only to you, that you could keep in your sock drawer as a way to restore your eSIM if your phone suddenly died. If you could tie your eSIM to some other account like your Apple ID, where your entire identity is in a digital blob that could be moved between hardware at will (we’re almost there, and then along comes eSIM with a non-backed-up bit of your phone’s data). Yet as with an increasing number of points in our digital lives, eSIMs live at this nebulous spot where you have less control than those of us who grew up with PCs need for comfort.
At least, for now, it’s reassuring for me to have gone through the process. You can move your eSIM, on your own, even if overseas away from your carrier. If you need to replace your phone on vacation or upgrade on a whim, it should be fine. eSIMs are ok.
I did something I didn't expect I'd ever do this year: I asked an AI for advice. Asking it for recommended places to visit on a trip is one thing, but this time I wanted to get some stuff off my chest, turned on voice mode, and just ranted for a bit. I'd avoided the idea for a while, with a nagging concern that outsourcing our thinking to AI is concerning enough, outsourcing emotional support is a step too far, and yet.
Surprise surprise, it worked out well. I still wouldn't recommend using AI as a therapist, with the dangers of it reinforcing negative thinking (with similar dangers to almost any online pursuit of advice, where a slightly negative YouTube query can send you spiraling into every more dark content). In my case, though, it mostly recommended hearing everyone out and making sure they knew they were heard even if everyone didn't agree, and so on. Nothing at all groundbreaking, but the simple process of talking out what was weighing on me itself felt good.
The month prior to that incident I'd spent my time testing journaling apps for Wirecutter. There were apps that were little more than digitized versions of paper journals. Do-it-all apps that essentially let you build a digital scrapbook documenting your lived experience. And, as is the case for every software category in 2025, AI-powered journaling apps promising to help you dig more into your thoughts.
Typically they'd start with a question about your day, either a prompt from a library or a generic question to get you to start typing. Then you'll ask for a followup, and the AI will digest what you wrote and ask a question about how that made your feel or what you'll do next or some other question that will guide you to keep typing. And ... it worked. It felt good. Not, again, that any specific insights came out of the extended prompts, but it made me think more about what had happened and approach my day more thoughtfully.
Zoom out, and it's the same as the classic improv idea of building on what another had said with "Yes, and," something that doesn't require an app, let alone AI. Yet the AI-powered journaling apps did fill an interesting spot in helping one be more mindful about their day and log more detailed journal entries that help you remember the day better just by having written it down.
The Tl;dr is that Day One packs an impressive amount of features into a journaling app, Apple Journal is a great free option, and Rosebud was my favorite implementation of journaling with AI. But that's the overview—go read the full piece for more details on which journaling app you should use to start logging your new year.
Credits down. Lights up. I can’t believe... and The impact... and That cliffhanger! and How could they keep us in suspense and No, what that meant was.. and Masterpiece and Worst film of the year. Chatter, human static.
You stand up and stretch, feel for your phone and wallet to ensure everything’s right with the world. Shuffle out of the theatre, popcorn crunching underfoot, past overflowing waste bins, out of the groggy warmth of the theatre into the blinding lights of the foyer.
Ping. Heavy rain in 3 minutes, the text fades in from the top right of your peripheral vision. Good thing. Not like you could have guessed the weather from the 7th floor. You’d scarcely know the time if it, too, wasn’t a glance away. Might as well grab a bite to eat while waiting for the storm to dissipate.
You drift with the flow, down an escalator, around a corridor, towards the xiaolongbao shop on the 6th floor, or 5th—you can vaguely picture it, and your sense of indoors direction is good enough to locate it, surely.
Hey just checking in on the copy for Thursday’s launch, pings a chat notification. Got a few minutes to chat about it?Had some last-minute ideas to add.
Deep sigh. If only theatre mode could be kept on forever. That rare escape into another world, free of distract... Actually, I’ll just jump in and make the changes directly if that’s find with you. Damnit. This client will be the death of you.
And the vaguely spacelessness and timelessness of the mall aren’t helping. The corridors turn into other corridors, the branded restaurants blur one into another. Everything on offer, anything for sale. Choice itself becomes burdensome.
Hey Alfred, where is the xiaolongbao shop? I should have a photo of it, somewhere, from the last time I was here.
Found it, replies the gadget. It’s on the 4th floor. Head downstairs, it says, and you comply, mind disengaged to autopilot, feet falling one after another without a conscious thought.
Turn left, and you turn. Ok, on your right. You’ve arrived. Enjoy your meal—and hey, don’t forget there’s a 50% special on the char siu bao today.
What would you do without your gadget, you think. Can’t live without it, even if you can scarcely live with the notifications. The benefits still outweigh.
Except, wait. Weird. You’re in front of a restaurant, all right, even one that sells bao. But this isn’t the xiaolongbao shop. You’ve never seen the place before; it wasn’t in your memories. And there, for definitive proof, underneath the faux-neon signage, hangs Grand Opening. Bouquets surround the checkout counter. The proprietor looks around—and you know they’re the owner, with their business casual attire, slight smile while surveying the crowds, the Thank you and come again and So glad you stopped by and Don’t forget to like us on The Network foreclosing any doubt.
But hey. A new place could be fun. Who needs xiaolongbao; here’s to adventure!
Hi, how many people are in your party? Just one? Ok, right this way. Shuffle past the crowds to the solitary stool at the bar. Might as well try the char siu bao; it’s on sale, after all. And this, and that, and soon you’re sipping hot oolong tea. You would have loved the film, you nearly whisper to Alfred. Wish you could have made it! Then the bao arrive, the bok choy, the soup, and in the hazy warmth your mind drifts back to the film. How could they have lived in such a time? How could one sit idly by?
If only... Ok, I decided to cut the entire “Why we built this” section. Too much. We built it, no need to explain. Everyone’s going to love it anyhow. And the fog lifts. You’re back in the restaurant, your tea’s gone cold. Time restarts. Whatever, Mr. client. You couldn’t care less, you tell yourself, yet you do, and now there’s a bug in your mind you’ll have to squash. They’d said, just yesterday, that you needed to add that section. Said it was crucially important, enough for you to burn the midnight oil in pursuit of a more perfect launch document. That, that was why you treated yourself to this half-day-off anyhow. And now it’s just another bit of cut copy—cut copy they asked for. And you could, right here, right now, pull up the doc in your field of vision, check their edits and fight for that precious bit of script’s life. Your darling, mercilessly cut and left on the editing floor. Who does that?
But no. It’s your—wait, what day is it? Thursday. It’s your Thursday evening. You wouldn’t be working for yourself if you didn’t want the occasional movie-and-dinner on a normal afternoon. You stop yourself. Breath. Focus. A long glance around to ground you. Edits can wait for ... Out of the doc. Damnit. Ready for launch 🚀.
It’s almost enough to want to walk back in the theatre for another 3 hours of well-earned silent mode.
Sigh. At least the food was good. Finish off the tea. Bite of roasted pork, the piece you were saving for last. Never as good as it was when it was hot, fresh, never as good as that first explosion of flavor when you bite into something for the first time. A photograph, a memory for your tastebuds, a parting gift of sorts, unsatisfying yet gratifying all the same.
Walk towards the entrance, a bit more haltingly than when you came in. You’re sated, 28 minutes and a year older all at once, it seems. Proprietor’s tending the register. How was your meal? Here’s your check. Long-stare into the screen, double-blink. Payment approved fades in. You turn. Exit to the left.
Scratch. The bao were half-off, right? You step back in, ask for the receipt you’d just refused, and nope, everything’s full-priced. Wasn’t there a... you start, then stop. It’s a new shop, they’ve likely dealt with a dozen mistaken bills already today. Whatever. You’ll live. Never mind, thank you! Yes, you’d be glad to leave a review.
It’s just not your day. How’s the weather now, Alfred? Scattered showers. Of course. Just your luck.
Hey Alfred, call a ride home. Sure thing, checking availability. Ok. Found a black Model Nee three minutes away. Meet them at Exit 3 on the ground floor.
Down the escalators. Around and around. You had asked me to remind you that you needed to pick up socks the next time you were out shopping, pipes in Alfred. Not now, Alfred. Next time. Time to face the rain.
Head towards the exit, but no, that’s exit one. Your ride has arrived, says Alfred. There’s a 10% discount if you head to the information desk to validate your receipts. No time for that, Alfred. Where’s the right exit? you reply. Up, down, left, right, and finally a 3 appears over the doorway in the distance.
You step out into the sunlight. Huh, it’s not as late as you thought. You blink, readjust, pupils constricting to restrict photon access. What’s the car’s license plate number, Alfred? TU2156, it replies, and a faint license plate hangs in your peripheral vision. Off to the right, behind two yellow cabs, waits a grey car, plates TU2156. That’s the car. Could’ve sworn it was supposed to be black. Whatever. Close enough.
Climb in. Buckle clasped. Lean back. Leg involuntarily moving to the vaguely familiar beats. Look up at the azure expanse. No haze, for a change. A bird flies by, solitary. The vehicle accelerates away, finds its place in the traffic, navigates towards your destination on dry, dusty lanes.
Jumping out for the day, pings your chat. Dropped in a new intro. But you can’t even muster the energy to be annoyed. It’s too nice out to stew.
If you’d known it was this nice a day, you’d have walked, saved the fare, closed your movement goal, made the most of your evening off.
Wait.
Where was the rain?
a story, by Matthew Guay. Originally written April 28, 2024.
Ice cream parlors made me freeze up, as a kid. Not from the freezers, or the brain freeze after wolfing down a scoop. Indecision, instead, left me holding up the line.
I’d step up to the counter, puzzle over the dozens of choices at the local ice cream parlor (the—sadly—long-defunct Kay’s of Knoxville), and settle for something reliable and familiar in the face of so many options. Over time, I settled on a rubric: I choose limited edition flavors or whatever I’ve never tried before, favoring novelty over familiarity.
Making choices between a wide range of equally appealing options can bring the best minds to a halt. You know, deep down, that you’re leaning in one direction. Yet what about this? What about that? You’re afraid of making the wrong choice, scared the right choice is not the absolute best. So you halter, waver, go back and change your mind, frozen by analysis paralysis.
Yet there’s a simple trick to overcome it: Reduce the options.
It’s hard to choose between 31 flavors. Far easier to choose between chocolate, vanilla, and salted caramel. That applies when you’re choosing items alone, or in a group; it’s almost possible to get a group of friends to decide between 10 restaurant options, but if you remove every option that anyone dislikes and have 3 non-objectionable top choices, it’s both easier to pick one option and safer since anything that gets chosen is unlike to be anyone’s least-favorite restaurant.
It’s not like you want no choices. It’d be a boring ice cream parlor that served only vanilla, and when a friend suggests a new restaurant, there’s always the chance you’ll discover a new favorite. You want just enough choices, not so many as to be overwhelming, but at least enough to require your input.
And so we built an app: Woolean. It’s the app to help you decide things.
The idea, for my co-founder Ryan, started with choosing lunch options. For me, the idea solidified with design and wording choices. For years, I’ve shipped articles to editors with multiple title and subtitle options (along, sometimes, with multiple header image options as well). I’d write my three favorites, they’d then comment on a favorite one or two, and we’d go from there. It’s like A/B testing ad copy, led by the content team’s personal preferences.
Then the same thing came up, when I worked with a design firm on Reproof’s branding. Our designers sent us three color palettes and four logo options—each were great, but we needed to choose the best. And so we’d remove our least favorite options, one at a time, until we settled on something we loved.
Again and again, I’ve found making choices to be easier when I can first winnow the options down, then choose from two of the best things. It goes for font choices, for photos, for vacation hotel choices, even for flights where you’re trading off getting to the airport at an ungodly hour for a direct flight.
Woolean is built for that and more. You can add a list of anything: Plain text items, dates, colors in hex value (including entire color palettes), links (complete with a preview), images, and audio. You can type out the list, or upload it as a spreadsheet. You can add a title if you’d like (to ask people to choose their favorite logo style without worrying about the colors, yet, perhaps).
Woolean will split any list up into one-on-one, pairwise comparisons of two options. Do you like the item on the left or right better? Click to vote—or use your right and left arrow keys to fly through comparisons. This versus that, over and over, until you work your way through the list.
As you’re voting, you’ll start to see your personal preferences taking shape. You might choose vanilla over strawberry, but would choose chocolate over vanilla, and salted caramel over chocolate and strawberry and oh turns out salted caramel is my favorite.
Share the link, and you’ll see the same realization unfold from your friends and colleagues’ choices. You might not find a unanimous favorite food for your next outing, but you’ll definitely find out that one thing that no one chose and can ensure you don’t pick everyone’s least favorite food.
Woolean is just for fun—and we’d love to hear how you use it. We’ve used it to make all types of decisions over the past few months, from Woolean’s name to its logo and core features.
Give it a try at woolean.com, list some things you want to compare, and let us know what you think. It’s 100% free—and while we might add some additional paid features in the future (and you can vote on those features now, in Woolean)
I, in more ways than I often realize, am a set-in-my-ways Millennial whose computing defaults were set in the '90's. I'm as addicted to my phone as the next guy, and will order something quickly or book a hotel room from my phone without thinking. But I always sit down at a computer to make any larger purchases, to research, to most "real work." I snap photos on my phone all the time, but reach for my (modern, mirrorless) camera for the important shots.
And, without even realizing this was an older, set-in-my-ways habit, when I need to scan a document, I'll open the top of my HP 3-in-1 printer and curse the printer overlords as I wait for the device to slowly digitize my paper into a PDF. It's not that I didn't know I could scan documents with my phone; I've scanned hundreds of quick, one-off things with Apple Notes. It's just that for "important" documents, I always defaulted to the largest equipment available.
Then Wirecutter asked me to review the best scanning apps, and after dozens of app downloads and nearly 30 hours of scanning documents with phone apps, something flipped. Scanning apps are good nowadays, good enough that for anything short of archival photo needs, you don't need a dedicated physical scanner to digitize documents anymore.
Adobe Scan was the standout best. You can line up a set of documents, then pan your phone over the set and turn them into a single PDF in a literal minute. vFlat was a surprise favorite for scanning books, where it'd seemingly magically remove distortion and return two flat, clean pages from one shot of an open book. Photomyne as a bit more frustrating, with incessant reminders to upgrade, but it too felt magical at individually scanning a page from a photo album into a half-dozen individual photos that were at least clear enough to share on social media.
It was a good reminder to update your priors, every now and then. A reminder, again, that the smartphone is the last gadget, more of a digital Swiss Army Knife than many of us that grew up on PCs appreciate.
Go download Adobe Scan; it's worth keeping on your phone, a rare free Adobe tool that seems almost too good to be true. And enjoy never (or, at worst, rarely) having to wait for a scanner to warm up again.
Testing dictation software for Wirecutter was a revelation. I went into the project assuming that Apple's built-in dictation was good enough for most people, Google's dictation would be similar on Android, few would want to use something other than the built-in dictation on their phones, and that Dragon Dictate would be clearly better but also expensive enough to relegate it to niche use-cases. Queue my surprise when it turned out that Microsoft Word's built-in dictation was so much better than the competition that it clearly stood out as the best dictation software (for now, at least—OpenAI's Whisper is as good or better, only it doesn't let you dictate punctuation. Easy to imagine that limitation going away in the near future). That's the value of side-by-side, systematic testing: You remove bias and come away with a clear-eyed view of capabilities.
My bias towards Apple dictation, though, was from near-daily use. As I wrote in a followup article for Wirecutter, I use dictation to reply to text messages on my phone all the time, and find it easier if not faster than typing. And it's reasonably accurate, even with names and locations I type frequently.
And that feels like something of a new normal. Typing is here, forever, but it's also increasingly supplemented by more human interactions with devices. Witness high schoolers handwriting notes on iPads then searching though and editing the text, with OCR making handwriting more accessible than ever. Witness people sending audio messages as soon as plane wheels hit the tarmac, or video calls in stores to ensure you're getting exactly what your spouse wanted. And—for me and other casual dictation users—witness dictating notes and text messages instead of typing.
Maybe, in our AI-augmented world, more natural device interactions will replace our more mechanical, key-and-mouse-driven computer interactions. The computer in your pocket is more powerful than the one that put a man on the moon; might as well put all of that spare computing power to use.
