A recent blog post from Marcin Wichary briefly discussed a proposed application interaction Mario Guzmán had posted on Mastodon. The aim was to help locate a window on screen:

As you can see in the demo above, clicking on the app’s Dock icon causes its main window to do a horizontal shake. While this is effective in drawing attention, as Wichary notes, this left-right shake already has a well-established meaning. Throughout MacOS, such a shake is used to indicate a password has not been accepted.

We actually tackled this exact problem several years back in SoundSource. The app’s main window can be pinned to remain open on screen. When it is, we wanted a click of the menu bar icon to draw attention to that already-open main window. We began with a left-right shake, much like what you see above.

Eventually, though, I realized it just didn’t feel right to me. The connection to both bad passwords and saying “No” was too strong. So I opened a case in our issue tracker titled “Consider modifying the ‘Here I Am’ shake”, and suggested that perhaps an up-down “yes” shake might work instead.

Nathan, our lead developer on SoundSource, experimented a bit. He eventually got us to the fantastic “pop” animation you can see here:

We released this change back at the end of 2021¹, and it can still be seen in SoundSource today. I recently noticed that Apple’s apps do a similar animation when opening an already-open file.² I remain delighted with this simple but effective pop animation. It feels like something other apps might adopt it as well.

Footnotes:

1. The release note for this read: “…now does a more logical ‘Here I am!’ pop to indicate its location.”↩︎

2. To see this, open an already-open file in almost any Apple app, including Pages, QuickTime Player, or TextEdit. The window for the file will quickly pop once. Though it’s not bad, I feel our double-pop is superior.↩︎

During a recent update to our site’s footer, we fell backwards into a fun little easter egg. It’s easy to miss, so I thought I’d draw a little attention to it here.

When I finished mocking up the site’s new footer, the rightmost column just happened to be shorter than the others, leaving an empty space and making the design look a little off balance. To fill the space, I added an existing drawing of our mascot Ammo. This was intended as a placeholder, but it turned out that everyone liked Ammo there. He made it through the design process to go live on the site.

That wasn’t the end of the story, however, as we were soon led on a fun little diversion by an offhand comment: “He should be dressed up for holidays”. Almost as soon as the words were spoken, a bit of PHP code was implemented to automate swapping images, and I found myself drawing a couple dozen variations of Ammo for a wide variety of calendar events.

One of my favorites is the Saint Patrick’s Day Ammo. My first draft had our mascot dressed as a leprechaun. I was quite satisfied with the drawing, which was relatively detailed for something so small. But after finishing it, I was struck by some inspiration. Just like the Chicago river being dyed green, I realized that as an amoeba, the mostly-water based Ammo could also go green. I threw out my more detailed drawing in favour of a quick colour shift, making an emerald Ammo for St. Patty’s day.

I’ve included a few of the special Ammos in this post, but there are many more for you to spot on various holidays and cultural events. As I post this, the gold medal-winning Olympics Ammo is visible in the footer. Watch our footer over the course of time to see more.