Ever want to link to a specific part of a web page? Well-designed web pages have anchors at the start of each section, which can serve as targets of links.¹ You’ve probably seen URLs that end in #something; that fragment identifier, or “frag-id”, refers to a specific anchor on the page.

What’s annoying, though, is that even if an author includes them, they’re hard to discover. Sometimes there’s a table of contents, sometimes not. What I really wanted was a way to just click on the nearest header and grab the link. So I wrote “Header Anchors”.

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I just discovered the site Little Big Details (via a UI designer’s Twitter feed…only I can’t remember whose).

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. These sorts of details are what separate functional software from good software. This is the sort of thing I was talking about in “Priorities”. This is something that I think Apple gets right more than most people, but something which is good for everyone.

Whenever there’s a place in your program where you can leave things as they are, or make things easier on the user, and you’re not on a deadline, the right choice is always make things easier on the user.

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When you compile a program that uses external libraries or frameworks, the last step (or a step near the end, at least) is to hook up all of the functions, etc. you use in your program to their implementations in the libraries. This is called “linking”.¹

A while back, Apple realized that when they added new features to their frameworks (usually with the release of each new OS version), people might want to take advantage of them, but remain backwards-compatible with old OSs. So they added a feature called weak linking. Apple wasn’t the first to realize that…

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