This is your quarterly reminder that if you have young kids and are a fan of the open web, they should be using on whatever tablet you have at home! It’s a fun and educational Progressive Web App I built for my own kids this year.

Alrighty, it looks like the new Sticker Brush and Sticker Library are about ready to ship in Kidz Fun Art (.That was a fun little holiday hack. My two little in house testers are busy doing their best to break it (they found 4 bugs already). Shipping soon!

Ugh, I did it again. Took a small idea, got it 80% there, and realized it was really the seed of a much larger idea. Hello Scope Creep my old friend…. Clone Brush in will now launch . later… as a more complete Sticker Library. Sigh, shut up brain.

Wish I could be there, sadly on the wrong continent. If you’re in New York this should be great fun with smart people.

Today's little project, adding a Clone Brush to Kidz Fun Art (. Not quite ready yet, but looking promising! I asked my amazing artist friend Arad (author of what it was missing to be an amazing comic book tool and he said this

TIL about this cool site that tracks Hacker News posts position over time - Seems like it's been around forever.

If @Tesla wants to both ship a cheaper car and fill a basically empty gap in the market they should:.- Ship a 2 door, 2 seat Model 3 (call it Model C for coupe?).- Make it rear wheel drive only.- 4s to 60mph is plenty power.- Make it light, no frills.- Cheaper than Model 3.

Great to see a lively discussion on Hacker News.

Are you interested in building apps for kids? Maybe just for your own, or with the hope that children all round the world will use what you make? I've put together my learnings from the last 4 years of doing so, hope you find something that inspires.

OK, hopefully this helps the small set of people looking to build delight for younger users of apps. For your reading pleasure, my learnings from 4 years of building an app for children.

Previous posts are at . “Best ever” may be a low bar, you be the judge.

I’m half way through writing what may be my best ever blog post. Remember those? Your parents used to write them before they gave up and just danced on TikTok. No one will read but I’ll just not look at the stats and pretend I really helped loads of people. Like the good old days.

Try these out yourself at , it's a 100% web based Progressive Web App for young, and young at heart artists. You can also get it for iPad at and Windows at

Controls that do similar things should look and work similarly, so there's no learning curve. The swirl tool is similar to rotate, so the control is the same, just a different colour

For controls that manipulate the selection, like rotation, I place them directly on top with a nice big colourful hit target, using a shape like a circle that suggests what to do with it. No tiny icons on the outer rectangle.

Even simpler are the controls for things like duplicating your selection. I make sure to put all controls related to your current action right there where you can see them, not hidden away in a menu. Kids won't hunt and peck in menus looking for controls, they'll just give up

Another example is copying & pasting between animation frames. Kids won't really understand that there's an invisible "clipboard" thingy, so I make the clipboard visible for them to click on. It also solves the tablet issue where you usually have to long press to discover Paste

A good example in Kidz Fun Art ( of designing powerful tools in a way that young kids can intuitively use them is the animated path feature. Just select a part of a frame, drag it a bit, say how many frames to use and done!

Why was I being a dick?.1 - I was reading their content daily, for free.2 - The quality is generally top notch.3 - People deserve to be paid for their work. 4 - Their experiment for maintaining editorial freedom is ballsy and worth supporting.

A while back @verge started aggressively hiding their contact behind a paywall. I did my usual hacker thing and got around it, but had to manually do it each time. Soon 2 things happened. 1 - It became annoying.2 - I realized I was being a dick, and just subscribed. Why? /.

Achievement unlocked for Kidz Fun Art (! I need to change my Stripe email notification settings for new paid subscriptions and payments as they’re getting too noisy. Onward!.