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“We want it to really confuse people, but also really make people happy”
I often link to John Gruber’s Daring Fireball posts with a nod, but this time around I want to offer an opposing point of view. About a month ago, Gruber linked to a Markdown editor written by Sean Malseed in 2026 for the early 1980s Macs, and commented:
I absolutely love that this exists. I don’t like the actual app at all. I guess “full screen” mode is the point of some “distraction free” editors, but I for one would never look twice at a Mac app that didn’t use windows. Full-screen mode just wasn’t a thing back then, except for games. ArtfulType is not a Mac-assed 1984 Mac app.
I posit: It doesn’t have to be. It’s not 1984, after all.
I actually really loved the creator of ArtfulType bringing back a few pieces from the future into the past: the fullscreen/distraction-free editing, the dark mode menu bar, the shy scrollbar. Those anachronisms felt exciting to me. They made me wonder: What if dark mode was invented decades earlier? What if Mac had a different windowing mechanism? What if we could do it all over again?
I recently linked to Sopwith, which felt interesting in the same way, and I thought I would expand on this and share a few favorite examples of similar projects that inspired me in recent years.
Confession: I’m not a fan of Teenage Engineering. I find their products well-put mechanically, but lacking in thought and soul, a certain apotheosis of “capital D Design” that feels as incomplete as it is masturbatory. (Rabbit R1 was a perfect example, consumed by gimmicks and strange design decisions.)
Good news is that Playdate is not a Teenage Engineering project, and that it was actually initiated by the software company Panic, which gave it copious amounts of thoughtfulness and care. Playdate is a 2022 handheld game console, and a fun little device that’s intentionally anachronistic. Its design picks the best parts of each decade: the gadget excitement from the 1980s, the onscreen aesthetics of the 1990s, the social internet of the 2000s, the explosion of indie games from the 2010s, all wrapped in contemporary build quality.
Playdate is partly made out of metal and pleasant to hold and touch in a way no vintage gadgets ever were – this is where Teenage Engineering does deserve a credit – but sports an old-fashioned monochromatic display that seems to be harking back to the darkest years of the first Gameboy… which is very, very deliberate:
I love the black and white, 400 by 240 pixel Playdate screen. I kind of like don’t want to design in anything else anymore,” says [Panic designer] Neven [Mrgan]. “It is so freeing for me, personally, to not think about the color and not think too much about, like, even things like line weight and whatnot. ”
The quote is from a long read about the Playdate’s inception (also available as a well-made podcast ep), which is worth checking out.