标签：#ui

Lea's pushing back on light/dark mode implementations that display three state options for visitors: light, dark, and system. Dark mode toggles: two states are enough originally handwritten and published with love on CSS-Tricks . You should really get the newsletter as well.

From surprisingly good $300 Chromebooks to excellent $650 Windows notebooks and more, these are the best budget laptops I’ve tested.

Why Is Overdraw Particularly Important in WebGL? When optimizing a Unity WebGL application, developers often focus on polygon count, draw calls, texture size, and shader complexity. But there is another performance problem that can quietly become expensive: UI overdraw . A UI may look simple to the player while the GPU is actually rendering the same pixels several times. A typical game interface might contain: A full-screen background Transparent panels Multiple decorative images Buttons Shadows Icons Text Semi-transparent overlays Popups Individually, these elements may seem harmless. When stacked together, however, they can significantly increase the number of pixels the GPU needs to process. Unity identifies overlapping transparent UI, sprites, and particles as common contributors to overdraw. So, is UI overdraw really killing your WebGL performance? Let's understand when it matters and how to reduce it. What Exactly Is UI Overdraw? Overdraw occurs when the same screen pixel is rendered multiple times during a frame. Imagine a 1920×1080 WebGL game with this UI: Full-screen background ↓ Transparent dark overlay ↓ Semi-transparent panel ↓ Panel decoration ↓ Button background ↓ Button icon ↓ Button text A pixel covered by all these elements may be processed repeatedly. Conceptually: GPU ↓ ┌──────────────┐ │ Background │ ← 1 │ Overlay │ ← 2 │ Panel │ ← 3 │ Decoration │ ← 4 │ Button │ ← 5 │ Icon │ ← 6 │ Text │ ← 7 └──────────────┘ Same pixel processed multiple times This is particularly relevant when your UI contains large transparent elements covering substantial portions of the screen. Unity's graphics documentation specifically recommends identifying and reducing overdraw when fill rate becomes a GPU limitation. Why Is Overdraw Particularly Important in WebGL? WebGL runs inside a browser, so performance has additional constraints compared with a native desktop application. If your application is GPU-bound, rendering unnecessary pixels means the GPU has more work to

I recently learned something about building products that I probably should have understood much earlier: People liking your product doesn't necessarily mean they need it. I built a platform called Rizzzler, an open-source profile/link-in-bio platform. The idea was pretty simple. I'd seen people using platforms where they could put a link in their social media bio and create a small personal page. I thought I could build my own version — something simple, fast, customizable, and a little more fun. So I built it. And because I wanted people to be able to trust what they were using, I made the project open source too. I spent a lot of time building the actual product. There are profiles, customization, coins, notifications, milestones, community chat, and other small systems intended to make the platform feel less like a static link page and more like something people could actually interact with. At that point, I thought: "Okay, now I just need people to find it." That turned out to be the easy part. Then I started promoting it. I submitted Rizzzler to places like Product Hunt, SaaSFrame, and other platforms where people discover new products. And for a few days, things actually looked pretty good. I started getting visitors. At one point, the traffic was above the 25th percentile for the category I was looking at in GA4. People were visiting. Some people signed up. And I started getting feedback like: "Good UI." "This is good." "Someone finally made link-in-bio profiles look cool." Those comments felt great. They also gave me a slightly dangerous impression: Maybe I've built something people actually want. Then the traffic stopped. Not gradually. It just became cold again. The initial spike from launching and posting about the product disappeared, and there wasn't enough organic interest to keep bringing people back. That was the part I didn't expect. The product wasn't necessarily bad. This is something I've been thinking about a lot. I don't think the main problem

Building software in 2026 feels surreal. With LLMs handling boilerplate, we ship features in hours that used to take weeks. But fast shipping has a nasty side effect: it breeds overconfidence. A few days ago, we ran an automated check against our own live marketing site ( vergate.dev ). We build security and diagnostic tools for a living, so we expected a clean bill of health. We were wrong. Our scanner flagged 8 real issues in production—including missing security headers that left us exposed to basic cross-site attacks. Dogfooding your own tool isn't a marketing gimmick. Sometimes, it's just plain embarrassing. But it taught us a crucial lesson: you can’t fix what you don't automatically measure. What our scan actually found Here is the exact breakdown of what slipped past us into production (and what probably exists in your current deployment right now): 1. Zero Security Headers Enabled Our hosting provider’s default CDN edge rules didn't set baseline headers. We were shipping without: Content-Security-Policy (CSP): Left us open to inline script injection. Strict-Transport-Security (HSTS): Didn't force browsers to enforce HTTPS strictly. X-Content-Type-Options : Allowed MIME-type sniffing on static assets. X-Frame-Options : Rendered our pages vulnerable to clickjacking IFrames. Why this happens: Framework defaults (like Next.js, Nuxt, or Astro) often expect your proxy or CDN edge (Vercel, Cloudflare, Nginx) to handle headers. If you forget to configure the edge, your app runs bare. 2. Sensitive Meta & Server Leakage Our response headers explicitly broadcast our server stack and proxy details. Attackers use automated scanners like Shodan or Censys to query these specific signatures and exploit target-specific CVEs in seconds. 3. Cookie Missing SameSite & Secure Flags A tracking cookie set on a subroute wasn't explicitly flagged as SameSite=Lax or HttpOnly , leaving a window open for CSRF-style cross-domain requests. How we fixed it (in under 10 minutes) Fixing the

Ensuring your cat stays hydrated is one of the best ways to keep your pet healthy. The right pet water fountain can help.

A few days ago I posted here about DevStacker, my app for helping self-taught developers escape tutorial hell and build real projects. We were getting ready to launch it, but then we found some bugs in the login screen. The app itself was working, but the login flow had some issues, and obviously we can't really launch while the first thing users see is broken lol. So we delayed the launch for a bit and we're fixing it now. I'm pretty close to getting everything ready, so hopefully DevStacker will be live very soon. This is also my first app, and honestly I didn't realize how many random things can go wrong until I actually tried to launch one 😭 Anyway, back to fixing login. I'll post again when DevStacker is finally live 🚀

This is a submission for Weekend Challenge: Dog Days Edition What I Built Pawford...

I was cleaning up the UI on a side-project iOS app and did one thing: set Dynamic Type to XXXL and screenshot every screen. Reading the code had turned up nothing. The screenshots showed problems immediately. Eleven of them, in the end. All the same cause. Here's the conclusion first. "A parent that pins things side by side" × "text that grows" is not a bug, it's a pattern. And in Japanese it breaks reliably worse than in English. English truncates. Japanese stacks vertically. Same layout, different failure depending on language. English wraps at word boundaries and, failing that, ends in … . You can't read it, but you can tell something was cut. Japanese doesn't do that. It can break between almost any two characters, so once a column is squeezed to one character wide, you get one character per line, stacked downward. Actual output: Rendered Intended Paire / d / Macs Paired Macs ( broken mid-word ) Claud / e / Code Claude Code One character per line "実行中のセッション" (Running sessions) Three step labels stacked vertically A three-step horizontal stepper De / mo , turning the capsule into a circle A "Demo" badge Paire / d / Macs is English breaking mid-word. Once the column has only a few characters left, even English gets there. Japanese gets there much earlier. The cause had the same shape every time Nearly all eleven were this: HStack { Image ( systemName : icon ) . frame ( width : 44 ) // fixed Text ( label ) Spacer () Text ( value ) // pinned right } The 44pt icon and the trailing value claim their width first, leaving the label column a few characters. The fix: rows that carry a value drop the value to the line below — but affordances like chevrons and toggles stay on the right. That row component was shared across the whole settings tree, so fixing one place fixed the entire settings screen. Which also means one decision inside a shared component was breaking eleven screens. ViewThatFits is not a general answer I used ViewThatFits to switch to a stacked layout. It

These are the Apple Watch accessories I recommend adding to your setup.

We’ve been testing bands since the first Apple Watch launched in 2015. From silicone sports straps to leather bands, I’ve rounded up the best for every occasion.

Building voice AI sounds deceptively clean on paper: capture speech, stream it to an STT engine, prompt an LLM, and synthesize audio back in real time. In reality, building a real-time, multilingual voice assistant that handles high-stress banking fraud while running on desktop hardware in 30°C heat with unstable power is a completely different story. As a Class 12 student diving into my first-ever hackathon, I spent the last 10 days of the #VoiceForBharat Challenge building Raksha —an empathetic, multi-agent voice assistant designed to protect Indian citizens from cyber scams, verify official government schemes, and escalate active financial fraud to human coordinators. Here is the honest breakdown of how Raksha evolved from Day 1 to Day 10, the absurd hurdles along the way, and what it actually takes to build reliable voice systems. 1. The Core Problem: Panic & Digital Banking Scams India's digital payments ecosystem is scaling at lightspeed, but so is financial fraud. Every day, people receive panic-inducing SMS messages claiming: "Your bank account is blocked. Update KYC immediately or share OTP." When someone is panicked, reading a 5-page PDF advisory is the last thing they will do. They need immediate, reassuring spoken advice in accessible Hinglish: "Ghabraiye mat. Bank kabhi phone ya message par OTP nahi mangta. Yeh poori tarah fraud hai." Voice is the most natural medium for this. If an AI agent can step in during those critical first 60 seconds, it can prevent immediate financial loss. 2. The 10-Day Journey: Power Cuts, Audio Hacks & Architecture Days 1–3: The Rocky Start & The Audio Hack Day 1 was pure chaos. I was battling 404s and gRPC hanging issues while connecting Gemini and LiveKit. Exactly 16 minutes before the midnight deadline, the power cut out completely. When it returned a minute past midnight, my desktop greeted me with a blue SrtTrail.txt Windows repair screen—and then another storm knocked the grid out again. I thought I was out on Day 1, b

For the last 10 days, I have been building a voice agent called Shiksha as part of the 10 Days of Voice Agents — VoiceForBharat Edition challenge by Murf AI. My original idea was simple: Build a voice agent that can help students learn through natural conversation. Over the challenge, that idea grew into a complete voice-based learning system with memory, tools, human escalation, call analytics, and a specialist agent . What is Shiksha? Shiksha is a voice-based learning partner for students. Instead of typing questions and reading answers, a student can simply talk to Shiksha. A student can: Ask learning questions Take quizzes Continue learning with their saved profile Get help when they are stuck Practice mathematics Get transferred to a Maths Specialist when needed The main goal was to make the experience feel more like a conversation than a traditional chatbot. Tech Stack Component Technology Real-time voice LiveKit Speech-to-Text Deepgram LLM Gemini Text-to-Speech Murf Falcon Backend Python Memory SQLite Call analytics Flask + SQLite External data Open Trivia Database The voice experience is powered by Murf Falcon , which was one of the main parts of the challenge. How Shiksha Works At a high level, the system looks like this: STUDENT │ ▼ LiveKit Real-time Audio │ ▼ Deepgram Speech-to-Text │ ▼ Gemini Agent Reasoning │ ┌────────────┼─────────────┐ │ │ │ ▼ ▼ ▼ Memory Tools Handoff SQLite Quiz API Maths Specialist │ │ │ └────────────┴─────────────┘ │ ▼ Murf Falcon Text-to-Speech │ ▼ STUDENT This was the basic architecture that I built and expanded throughout the challenge. What I Built 1. Student Memory One of the first things I added was a simple memory system using SQLite. Shiksha can store: Student name Current learning level Topics covered Last interaction This means the agent can use information from previous conversations instead of starting from zero every time. 2. Real Tool Calling For quizzes, I didn't want the agent to always generate questions from memor

Fascinating video about searching for life undersea. The video basically makes the point that our bright white searchlights are scaring everything away, and that red light is more neutral. That, plus bait to attract sea creatures, is teaching us a lot about what’s going on down there. Lots of footage of giant squid, and speculation about the colossal squid. Worth watching. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Blog moderation policy.

If you’re a student looking for an affordable laptop, I have bad news and I have good news. The bad news is that computer prices are out of whack due to the ongoing RAM and storage crunch, making some a little pricier than they used to be and others wildly more expensive. The good news? […]

Apple is asking a federal judge to allow it to charge commissions of up to 15% on purchases made through external links in iOS apps.

If digital calendars are leaving you lacking, these WIRED-tested paper agendas and notebooks could change your life.

Protect your Pixel 10a, Pixel 10, or Pixel 10 Pro XL with a tried-and-true phone case, screen protector, and Qi2 charger.

Can electrifying your workout offer a shortcut to a stronger, fitter you? I sweated in a skintight EMS suit for two months to find out.

My expert advice on what computer monitor to buy for your home office, ranging from budget-tier to fully featured.