I pay close attention to the scalability of my actions. This often leads to situations where it seems like I’m acting against my best interests, but I want to make choices my future self will thank me for.

Instead of allowing myself a slow morning after a restless night, I go for a run.

Instead of relaxing on the couch, I'm teaching myself how to code.

Instead of avoiding a difficult conversation, I embrace it.

These things share one important truth: I know that I will feel better once they've happened. These actions are scalable because they optimize for delayed gratification. They anticipate a future that will be better because I welcomed friction.

Nothing worth having was ever achieved without effort.

Once I internalized this way of thinking, it changed how I see myself and those around me. Chasing instant gratification doesn't align with the life I want, and watching others do so isn't something I enjoy.

I want to be, and surround myself with, people who are willing to put in the effort to live a life their future selves will thank them for—people who make scalable, life-affirming choices because they know these actions grow and compound over time, leading to greater, unexpected benefits.

Since I started running in January, I’ve noticed something that, while not incredibly surprising, is still new to me: while I’m running, I feel stronger, more physically capable, and healthier. It’s a reliable way to experience eustress on a scalable level.

What’s more, when my body feels like it’s functioning as it should, the quality of my thinking improves as well.

Physical strength leads to clearer, more optimistic thoughts, and less ego-driven thinking. When I’m not using energy to build up defenses, it’s easier to be more kind, humble, friendly, empathetic, and loving.

In short, feeling physically strong makes it easier to think strong thoughts. Running is a simple, scalable and reproducable way to achieve that.

Apple nonchalantly released iOS 18 with a new feature that’s about to change the lives of a huge part of the population. Vehicle Motion Cues is an accessibility feature that’s on by default and activates when your iPhone detects a moving vehicle around you.

It works by layering a bunch of animated dots on top of the content you’re looking at. When the device detects changes in the vehicle’s motion, it animates the dots accordingly, tricking your brain into thinking everything is fine instead of making you feel like you need to puke because the real-life physics engine stopped working.

I’ve struggled with motion sickness and haven’t read a book in a car or bus in 29 years. I didn’t find it very convincing that showing little circles on top of everything else would help, but yesterday, I spent 24 minutes on a bus, reading a whole chapter, and I was completely fine.

That never happened before.

Vehicle Motion Cues works, and it literally changed my life.

Something I enjoy a lot is thinking about potential future versions of myself. At some point, I’m going to be a dog owner. Someone who enjoys classical music and regularly attends orchestral concerts. I might have a couple of years where I get into biking, woodworking, hiking or knitting.

It's not like I'm actively planning these versions. I might get a dog when I'm 50. Or when I'm 75. I could start woodworking tomorrow or 20 years from now. Maybe I'll spend my 40s learning how to play the piano. Who knows.

The fun in thinking about these possible iterations is not in knowing when exactly they're going to happen but in expecting to have a life full of achievable possibilities. A life full of things I’m going to enjoy.

No matter what happens, there’ll always be an iteration of me that’s preoccupied with his current obsession—who’s looking forward to getting out of bed to go for a walk with the dog, sanding a piece of wood, polishing a bowling ball for the big tournament, or practicing a sonata.

I love that for me.

It had been years since I was in the same room as a piano. That changed the other day, and I didn‘t expect how deeply hearing it live would move me—far more than a recording of the same piece would.

There’s something different about hearing an instrument played in person. Every speaker will always only be a representation of what the music is supposed to sound like. But when that layer of translation is removed something changes and you’re somehow able to feel the instrument as part of the music and room.

Now I‘m wondering if I should give going to the orchestra a try. Or even start a new side quest by taking piano lessons?

I feel like sharing thoughts with strangers online gets harder the longer you go without doing it. My plan was to write at least something in August so it wouldn’t be a month without any activity here. Obviously, that didn’t happen. Partly because my month was filled with great people, activities, and weather, and partly because I felt like I needed to write something of value and couldn’t manage to produce anything I was happy with.

As you can see, I decided to solve this issue by posting something about not posting anything. An age-old trick in blogging: blogging about blogging. That being said, I actually believe it helps to keep the sharing muscle from atrophying. These posts don’t cost me anything. I don’t have to be precious about them.

A lot has happened since I wrote about my intention to move back to Hamburg.

For example: I moved back to Hamburg.

The move itself went off without a hitch. My stuff was put into a truck, my cats and I were picked up by friends, and we all made it successfully to my new flat. It took far longer than expected, but it got done.

Since then, I have unpacked all the boxes, kind of arranged everything in a roughly pleasing way, and got to know my new neighborhood and even my neighbors. I have gone for lunch, dinner, and walks with friends. I continued running every other day, even together with friends. I went on a couple of dates, found a new dentist and hairdresser, and have thoroughly enjoyed where I live.

I can't stress the last point enough: my sheer existence here feels like bliss. I step out of the house and love every second of it. Life is happening all around me, and I'm taking part in it.

The last three weeks felt like reality has realigned with how it should be, and I couldn't be happier about it.

Let's face the facts: I could go on for hours and hours talking about how unhappy I am where I currently live. Trust me, in private, I sometimes struggle to talk about anything but this situation. Instead of boring you with post after post, let's just sum up what's going on and talk about how to solve it.

• I was convinced that life in a smaller town would be the right thing for me. Instead of trying it out for a couple of months, I moved there completely. Like an idiot. That might not have been the smartest decision, but it sure felt right at the moment.
• I was wrong. In terms of work, money, and negative emotions involved, this might have been the biggest mistake of my life. Which, all in all, speaks volumes about how good my life is going. It's a very privileged position to be in.
• At the same time, this might be the most important lesson of my life. I won’t ever have to wonder what life in a small town would be like, not to mention one of those dreamy cabin-in-the-woods situations people like me tend to fantasize about. Not for me, no thanks!
• All of this also changed my relationship with... people. Like, in general. I’m far more thankful for them. When visiting friends in Hamburg, I actually enjoyed being stuck in a completely overfilled subway. I enjoyed walking around the Alster dodging hundreds of people doing the same. It's a price I'm willing to pay for living in a proper city. It also gave me renewed motivation to work on my yearly theme.
• I was so convinced about moving here that I was fine with signing a tenancy agreement with a minimum rental period of two years. My thinking was that you'd have to at least give it a good shot for this amount of time to be able to figure out if you like it or not. Oopsie. (I can get out of it by paying a lot of money. The process is already underway.)

So, okay, whatever. Things happened, I was wrong about how I’d feel, and I went through all the necessary emotions to come to following conclusion:

I have to move.

Again.

Not great, not terrible. I learned a lot about myself and how I want to spend the rest of my life. That alone made this little, stupidly expensive intermezzo worth it. A solid 3.6 Roentgen situation.

So what's next?

I'll move back to Hamburg.

Before moving to Berlin about nine years ago, Hamburg was what I called my home, and it still feels like it. Most of my friends live there, I love the city, and I kind of can’t wait to come back.

So that’s it. I’m off trying to find a place to live in a city that is known for its horrendous housing market. Thanks for reading, and a big thanks to all of you who reached out to talk to me about this experience. I appreciate it!

Oh, by the way, if you hear something about a soon-to-be vacant apartment in Hamburg: Let me know!

I even built this little site you could share with your friends and colleagues to help me on my quest.

https://eine.wohnung.fuer.marcel.io

Thank you!

I Might Have Made an Oopsie

• Part 1: Local Retail
• Part 2: The People
• Part 3: The Possibilities
• Part 4: I'm moving back to Hamburg

What surprised me the most about my emotional state after moving from Berlin Mitte to a city of 100,000 inhabitants was how much I miss... everything.

I never made much use of what Berlin has to offer, yet I took quite a few things for granted.

Restaurants, for example. I could have sworn that I didn’t care that much about food. Unfortunately, that seems to have been the case only because I was surrounded by fantastic food and restaurants ever since moving out from home. I miss it—all the choices of different establishments, all the culinary options. The fact that 4.8 stars on Google Maps actually meant something. I’m not even complaining about the lack of vegetarian options. It’s not even possible to get good fries anywhere.

I could live with that, though, if it weren't for the fact that absolutely nothing else is going on. Of course, I expected there to be less to do, but not this little.

After scouring the internet for hours in February, I found one (ONE!) interesting thing to look forward to: a lecture about salt and its history, with a tasting of salts from all over the world at the end. I knew I'd be roughly half as old as the other participants, but I was ready to mingle when I booked it for mid-April.

The one real museum is being renovated and won't open for more than a year. Things that do happen, like cocktail nights in the sole co-working space, result in a gathering of like four people. Two of them are the owners of the place.

I'm not even kidding.

Going to the movies was always a great solution for me to get my mind off things. The one good cinema doesn't offer screenings with original language, though, and I won't watch American and British movies with German dubbing. I haven't lost all of my self-respect.

Even though I didn’t make much use of what Berlin has to offer, it was good to know that I had options. If I wanted to do something, there was more than enough, sometimes even too much. All the options felt paralyzing at times. Now I long for them. I expected a reduction in possibilities to feel freeing; instead, it’s just depressing.

By the way, that lecture about salt I mentioned earlier?

It got cancelled.

For lack of interest.

I Might Have Made an Oopsie

• Part 1: Local Retail
• Part 2: The People
• Part 3: The Possibilities
• Part 4: I'm moving back to Hamburg

I grew up in a small village near the coast of the North Sea. Six thousand inhabitants, all of them very concerned with what the other 5,999 could think about them. This never felt right to me, and I thought there should be more to life than that. Even going to school in a city of 26,000 didn't change that feeling. The people around me didn’t share my interests, but I connected with others online who lived in big cities. I wasn't able to communicate exactly what I was feeling back then but I knew that I needed to get out.

Fortunately, 16 years later, I somehow found myself in the same situation again and am now able to express what it is that bothers me.

After living in Berlin Mitte for eight years, I was completely convinced that I needed a cozy small town without the depressing anonymity and all the noise. How great it would be to walk outside and not have to dodge others left and right.

I was wrong.

I miss what I was despising just a couple of months ago.

Yes, it was a lot and I wished for quieter surroundings at times. Of course, I wasn't happy with some aspects of my situation. Yes, I've seen a surprising amount of penises from randos pissing on the street. Not great!

It was interesting, though. Things changed from day to day. People were weird. Normal. Exciting. Profane. Loud. Quiet. Something. I stepped outside and life happened.

Schwerin, with it's less than 100,000 inhabitants, most of them teenagers or pensioners, is... boring.

Not in the way I thought it would be, where I expected the quietness and solitude to magically expand my mind. Walden Pond style. On the contrary: I kind of feel alone and mentally under-challenged.

I don't want to come across as contemptuous. A different version of me could love it here. I just don't want to be that version. Even though I respect everyone who finds what they're looking for in a place like this.

I've found that I want to be surrounded by people my age, with a high likelihood of shared interests. And as cringe as it might sound, I'm afraid mine are big-city-people interests. Internet-work people. I want to see, meet, and talk to people... like me. Or at least me-adjacent.

Here's the catch, though: People like me feel like they don't belong here.

I know because — and this might come as a surprise to you — I am a person like me.

And that's just one aspect. If you had asked me about this six months ago, I would have said something completely different, but here’s the reality: It’s too empty here. I can go for a 45-minute run and only meet five people—all of them pensioners, of course. I can walk from the main station to my flat on a Saturday night and not encounter a single person. That’s just depressing.

I haven't felt like this since moving away from where I grew up.

What I expected before the move was an expansion into a new way of being. Of feeling content with smallness, of finding joy in normalcy. Instead, it feels like a regression to something I left behind for a reason.

A reason that hasn't changed since I first felt it more than 16 years ago.

I Might Have Made an Oopsie

• Part 1: Local Retail
• Part 2: The People
• Part 3: The Possibilities
• Part 4: I'm moving back to Hamburg

Many of you (nobody) asked how moving from a 3.8 million inhabitants city to a less than 100,000 inhabitants city is treating me. In the last couple of months, I went through quite a lot of thoughts and emotions and arrived at some new opinions that surprised me. I won't be able to fit them all in one coherent post so here you go, in no particular order and in good-old blogging style. Welcome to part one of who knows how many instalments of IMHMAO.

Today: Local Retail.

I wasn't expecting this, like at all, but I seem to have demands for the quality and diversity of stores around me. Every time I tried to buy something in a store in Schwerin, I wasn't able to find what I was looking for. We're not talking about heavily exotic stuff here. Pants, for example, were nowhere to be found. None of them fit me, they were all far too big. I'm not weirdly shaped, on the contrary. It won't get more default than me. I ran out of stores to try before I found something I liked. That never happened before. Another time I tried to buy brushes: Nothing. Same for sketchbooks. Same for pretty baskets to store stuff in or colorful decoration. Nothing.

This might seem like a small matter but I like walking somewhere, browsing a limited but plentiful offering of wares and going back home with whatever I needed as the result. It makes me feel connected to where I am.

It doesn't help that online shopping became a pain in the ass at some point. There's just too much to choose from, everything, even Amazon, is full of scams and I hate the whole process. Choosing, ordering, waiting, tracking, receiving, returning. I don't need that noise.

So that's an insight: I would not have guessed that a heavily limited selection of stores would influence my mood this much but it does. The more you know!

I Might Have Made an Oopsie

• Part 1: Local Retail
• Part 2: The People
• Part 3: The Possibilities
• Part 4: I'm moving back to Hamburg

If you want to grow, you need to be able to learn, experiment, and stay consistent. That's only possible if you're able to keep yourself motivated, which is impossible if you're not being kind to yourself.

Many people think that being kind means not doing what needs to be done because it's hard. That giving themselves breaks from trying is what they need.

They think it comes easily to those succeeding at what they set out to do and if they themselves struggle, it's obviously not for them. They're special in how hard it is for them. Hence, they deserve time off from trying.

That's one of the biggest misconceptions, and I believe the inherent problem is with how people talk to themselves.

Growth is the result of enough repetitions, many of them ending in some sort of failure. Your drawing doesn't look like anything you expected, your run felt terrible, your code doesn't compile.

If your inner voice gets destructive every time you mess up, you're less likely to try again. Ironically, you are getting in yet another successful repetition of talking badly about yourself.

If you learn to not succumb to negative self-talk, it gets a lot easier to get back to what you set out to do and start another repetition. You'll still fail, you'll still find it hard, but you won't be in a constant fight with yourself anymore.

I strongly believe that everybody can achieve whatever they set out to do, as long as they keep at it. It might take forever, it might require a whole lot of deliberate practice and deep work, but as long as the repetitions don't stop, progress is inevitable.

The key difference between you and those who make it seem easy is probably that they're kinder to themselves.

First things first: Some of you will get triggered by what I'm about to write. I want you to know that this is a safe space. You're loved. I'm not attacking your character, your personality, or any life choices you've made. Please stay calm and collected. This will be tough, but we'll get through it.

Alright! Now that I've dealt with the little feelings of the worst junkies among you, let me tell you about the first and only addiction I've ever had: caffeine.

I don't have an addictive personality and have never had any problems with the usual suspects. What made caffeine different is that our society somehow neglects to talk about it as a drug. Everybody is juiced up 24/7 and at best, we'll get a "don't talk to me before I've had my first coffee" joke instead of an actual warning about what are clear symptoms of withdrawal.

It took me years until I figured out that caffeine could be the reason for the ever-present headaches that plagued me for most of my 20s. I suspected having a brain tumor before even considering caffeine as the culprit.

Society doesn't want you to suspect its favorite lubricant.

The following weeks of withdrawal, going completely cold turkey and not touching anything that contained caffeine, were harder than I expected them to be. A fun fact as an aside: Many painkillers contain caffeine. That's not the information you want to learn while feeling like your head is about to explode.

Long story short: After successfully getting clean, my headaches were gone. I felt like myself for the first time in years. I wasn't tired all the time; I woke up alert and it stayed that way until the evening hours. Exactly like all the people talking about how you should quit caffeine said it would be. They're right.

Caffeine traps you in a vicious cycle of needing it to feel like you don't need it.

Since then, I've been in a constant struggle to keep clean. As soon as I drink something with caffeine for two to three days, the headaches come back. Which is a bummer, because those headaches can be cured through caffeinated beverages and the cycle starts anew.

I had a couple of relapses but always managed to go through another round of withdrawal. It's surprisingly hard to stay "sober". If I'm having a bad day, I crave a caffeine high to make me feel better. On a good day, I want something with caffeine to celebrate and enjoy my day even more.

I found an okay-ish rhythm where I allow myself one caffeinated beverage per week. As a treat. The only problem is that I have to account for the willpower needed the next day because I'll crave another one more than if I hadn't had the first one.

Lately, despite my best efforts, I've noticed more gray hairs at my temples, recurring fashion trends, and a sharp memory of events from two decades ago, all of which frequently remind me that I'm getting older.

The other day, I was wondering what my official year of retirement would be if the German laws don't change and I don't die or get very sick before then. I'm writing this in 2024; I turn 35 in May, and the current retirement age is 67. My last year of officially having to be an active member of the working force will be 2056.

Two thousand fifty-six!

That's 32 years from now!

My entire mentally present life, once again.

At this point, there's a fork in the road of how to feel about this. "Oh shit, I still have to do this for more than 30 years?" or "Oh wow, that's so much time left!".

Fortunately, I landed on the second option.

Your mid-30s are a weird age. You meet people who seem convinced (or have to convince themselves?) that they've arrived. They worked, found success in some kind of career and are now ready to settle down. All of this makes it feel like there's nothing yet to come.

That's completely wrong, though. We're not talking about 32 years until I'm basically dead. They're productive years full of potential building, transformation and growth.

Let's say you studied and started your first real job in your early 20s: You worked for just one quarter of what is considered the norm. What's left is enough time to start three new, completely unrelated careers, if you're so inclined.

32 years!

How cool is that?!

I've been sharing my opinions online since I was 14. Something that has changed over the years is my relationship with the reactions I receive.

When you share something online, people will react. Most of the time, they try to one-up you, either by pointing out something you apparently missed or by flat-out telling you that you're wrong and they know better.

That's not surprising. It's how people operate.

In my early years of blogging, I viewed this behavior as a challenge. My whole personal brand was about "being combative." "Don't feed the trolls" was still a saying back then, and I completely ignored its inherent truth.

It's not just trolls, though. My recent post about filter icons resulted in quite a few reactions, most of them telling me things I already knew. I struggle with people implying I haven't thought about what they're now kindly offering me as new information. It's likely one of those ego things where I feel undervalued if people consider me uninformed.

My first reaction—and I've started and deleted quite a few responses like this over the last couple of days—is to react with some witty "You think you've accomplished something here, but let me show you that you're actually not that smart" remark. It's an asshole move and exactly the behavior I've trained myself to stop doing over the last few years. It's not easy, but it's worth it. Letting things go always feels better than trying to win something that isn't even a competition.

All of this influences my writing. I knew that these reactions would be the result of my short and not very in-depth argued post about filter icons. I could have written a 5,000-word piece on the ins and outs of why the status quo is the way it is, offered alternative icons, and talked about their pros and cons to anticipate those reactions as well. But that wouldn't have been fun. Everything requires a disclaimer.

I would lose my voice if I tried to optimize my writing around the expected reactions. I'd dumb everything down, argue in every direction, just to be safe. That's just not an option. Just like trying to outwit the people reacting to my writing isn't one.

Am I suggesting that you should ignore your readers? Perhaps!

"The Truth of a Thing Is in the Feel of It, Not in the Think of It"

Since I heard this quote from Stanley Kubrick for the first time a few weeks ago, I couldn’t let go of it. It encapsulates a moment in design that makes me feel like a hack every time it happens.

I’m a stern believer that software design is a craft, not an art. There are artsy aspects to it, but for most of the time, rules can and should be followed. They’re flexible and complex, but not inexistent.

Another belief of mine is that designers have to be able to argue for their solutions. A working designer’s inner monologue should be the Socratic method that is being applied to every design decision, no matter how small.

Sometimes, truly not often, there are moments where this isn’t enough. You know what the correct solution would be, the one with the most arguments, the one that fits the rules, but it just doesn’t feel right.

There’s no way to explain this to those who don’t feel it. They just have to trust your instincts. Sometimes, designing something the wrong way creates the right solution.

Gavin Nelson recently redesigned his portfolio and it's looking ✨crisp✨. I wondered how to get an iPadOS hover effect like that to work and with quite a bit of help of my friend Nils, a few discussions with ChatGPT and finally understanding LayoutGroups in Framer Motion, I present to you this solution. I'm sure it's far worse than Gavin's, so please don't think I know what I'm doing.

I've been coding for about two years now and it changed my relationship to my role as a run-of-the-mill product designer spending most of his day in some sort of design software.

It already began many, many years ago: Moving rectangles on a canvas started to feel like a crutch. Most of the time I already know what needs to happen and what lies between me and having done a good job is pushing stuff around in Figma until what I think should be visible is actually visible. It feels like a chore.

Even though my day job isn't a Swift/SwiftUI based project, I've started creating prototypes with SwiftUI just to scratch my itch to do something "real". The code is as throwaway as it can get but it feels better — and somehow more productive — to create an empty data state based on if an array is empty or not than to duplicate a frame, call it "FeatureName / Empty Data State" and consider my job done.

Enter: The Design Engineer

"Design Engineer" is not a new term. I've known about the concept for years but somehow only considered becoming one after reading Jim Nielsen's piece on Design Engineers the other day:

The problem of innumerable artifacts helps show why design engineers are worth their weight in gold. They can bridge the chasm of design to browser engineering, skipping the need for 60+ artifacts. How? They have an understanding of the constraints of the medium, so from sketches to wireframe to high fidelity mocks, they only have to produce one or two artifacts while simultaneously keeping a picture in their head of how the elements of those designs flex and flow and change across different sizes. They can imagine how it works, so they don’t have to articulate it for every iteration. There’s no need to explicitly design and document all possible states for whoever is downstream of the designs because they are the ones downstream of the designs.

That could be me! Most of it is me already, I only lack some of the skills (and currently also the environment) to produce code on a reliable basis.

In Jim's second post he shares an example of what a Design Engineer could bring to the table and I adore everything about this. This is the stuff I love spending hours and hours on to get right. For most of my career I was dependent on a developer who put up with me and my dEsIgN-eXcElLeNcY shenanigans. It's hard to find frontend devs with an appreciation for this kind of work and even if you find them, there's still an obvious translation layer that can be a barrier between vision and result.

Transforming Marcelf Transforming myself

So, what's next? Do I want to become a Design Engineer? Imposter Syndrome and fear of failure tell me that it's a safe bet to just stay in my lane, create my little PNG files and be happy with what I've got.

However, I doubt that this will be good enough for me in the medium term. I very much enjoy fiddling with code to get something working in a user-friendly and good looking way. I even believe that the future of computing requires designers to code. So there's really no choice, if I'm honest with Marcelf myself.

I'm on a good trajectory with Swift and SwiftUI. It's the iOS/iPad OS/VisionOS framework of the future and Apple's ecosystem is the playground of my choice.

My HTML and CSS skills aren't embarrassing but especially the latter has quite a few depths I haven't charted yet. I built one or two things in React and played around with Framer Motion. Both are fun.

I feel like this could be a solid foundation for a toolkit that helps me to morph from "just" being a designer who codes to becoming a design engineer. It's time I get the reps in, especially in terms of all things web development. I want to become very good at using Framer Motion.

All of this is of course only relevant if I can't come up with a solid project that catapults me into the indie dev league. At the same time becoming a design engineer is the best way of honing my coding skills to become an indie dev.

That's what I like to call a win-win situation.

Comparing the current Quest ecosystem to the very first iteration of Apple's Vision Pro doesn't make sense. This isn't because it wouldn't be a fair comparison, given that Vision Pro is still in its infancy, but rather because the Quest lacks an app ecosystem.

The word and definition of "app" do the heavy lifting in that sentence.

The Quest has a plethora of amazing experiences. It's the best platform for diving into literal virtual reality and shared (mostly gaming) experiences. While these are technically applications, they're not what people commonly think about as apps.

Spatial Computing

If you go ahead and browse through Meta's Quest Store, you'll find everything from drawing in the space around you, to virtual meeting spaces, to ways to learn piano and even a handful of solutions for those who want to work out while wearing their headset, for whatever reason. What you won't find are Slack, Discord, any kind of note-taking app, a way to write down tasks, or anything else you'd expect from your computer.

That's where Spatial Computing comes into play. The term is more than Apple slapping their branding magic onto something that was already available. Spatial Computing is computing. You, using a computer, in the space around you.

Let's consider the Xbox. Yes, tEcHniCalLy the Xbox is a computer but only pedants would call it that. It's a console and does a great job at being one. Sure, you can open a web browser on it but there's really no reason to do so on a regular basis. The Quest is more like a console than a computer.

A shared design language

As far as I know, there's not even a UI framework for Quest development. Most of it happens in Unity, which is notoriously bad when it comes to creating 2D interfaces. There are a handful of other solutions to get something running on Quest but there's no chance of Quest apps actually getting to a point where the system as a whole has a unified design language.

Which is fine for games/experiences, there's no unified design language between Fortnite and Assassin's Creed either. It doesn't matter, because they're unique experiences.

This is not fine for an operating system of a computing platform.

It might feel like a small and obvious thing that Apple allows iPad apps to run on Vision Pro but it isn't. On day one of Vision Pro, there were more apps to manage your calendar than after years and years of Quest's existence. Which makes sense, since one of them is a game console and the other is a computer. One of them more or less requires you to start your development in a game engine, the other allows you to create a good-looking, albeit basic todo app with 30 lines of code.

Can Meta massage Quest into becoming an app platform?

I guess?!

It would be a long way to get there and you'll arrive at the same "quality" of apps Android can try to boast about but it's possible in theory. Can Vision Pro be used for VR experiences? Sure. It's already possible, with the only caveat being that there are no available controllers at the moment.

Quest and Vision Pro only share one similarity: People strap displays to their heads to interact with software. Everything else is fundamentally different. It can be compared but there's not really a good reason to do so.

Not necessarily directly but perhaps slightly related to my Year of Friendship, I bought a bag of shelled peanuts and stuffed a handful of them in my jacket pocket.

I'm befriending crows now.

Nothing can stop me.

It's legal, it's possible, it's necessary.

This is not my first foray into bird friendship territory. After reading The Bird Way, a fantastic book by the way, I started greeting crows. Jennifer Ackerman's half-joking conclusion was that there's a non-zero chance that crows will rule the world one day, and I want to be on their good side, in case this happens faster than expected. Even if they keep their talons still and don't overthrow us, they also can remember human faces for years and are not shy to declare certain people their enemies and even tell their friends about them.

Anyway! In hopes of being recognized as a good source of snacks, I started throwing peanuts in the general direction of crows.

There are so many people with crow friends sharing their corvid adventures online, why shouldn't I be one of them?

I'm not lonely, you're lonely! Expect my pivotal role in some Home Alone remake in the future.

By the way: For more about a world ruled by corvids, I suggest Children of Memory. However, it's best to start with the first two books of the trilogy.

After babbling about Products People Want to Use I started to work on a shopping list app. Not because I had a strong vision of what I wanted to build, no, only to have something to work on and not lose my momentum.

The app, called Zettel, reached an interesting stage I felt was worth sharing. It looks great, it is more or less feature complete and it works, I've used it for all of my recent grocery shopping trips.

There's only one catch: It doesn't feel right. Stanley Kubrick said "The truth of a thing is in the feel of it, not in the think of it." and this is one of those moments. Something about the gestures, the giant tap targets and how adding items works is not right. The vibe is off.

I still have a couple of ideas that will most likely result in a complete redesign of the whole app. Before that happens, I wanted to share the current state for archival purposes.

Remember how I proudly proclaimed that I'm done with Wordpress and moved this blog to Astro? Well, that didn't last very long. I still think that Astro is great but it feels like it's better suited for marketing websites and maybe web apps than blogs. The one thing that got me in the end was the fact that I did not manage to create a proper RSS feed with images and other bells and whistles.

The first and last time I felt envious was when my friend Kjell got a Mac before me. It’s not that I grew up in a particularly wealthy household—quite the opposite, in fact—but I had never wanted something as badly as my first Mac, feeling as though my future as a designer depended on it.

It took me a while to recognize the feeling, and I experienced quite the epiphany when I was finally able to label what was ruining my mood. I believe this was my first instance of practicing introspection.

It was also the first time I decided I didn’t want to feel a certain way and began to work on changing my perception of the situation. I wanted to be happy for my friend.

This experience was significant and continues to resonate throughout my life. I consider self-efficacy one of the most important skills a person can have. Writing about my first Mac brought these memories back, and I hope Kjell never noticed my feelings at the time. Though I doubt it, as I also wasn’t very good at being nice back then. That, however, is a topic for another time.

It’s the Mac’s 40th birthday, and people on Mastodon are sharing their very first Macs.

Mine was a Mac Mini G4. I didn’t even realize that I actually had started using Macs before the Intel transition happened until I read the Wikipedia article about it just now. The hardware specifics didn’t interest me back then. Fifteen-year-old me wanted to become a designer and knew that all the designers he looked up to used Macs, so there was really no choice.

My previous computer was a very old and very slow PC that didn’t even run the games all my friends were playing together online. Let’s not even talk about the performance of my pirated copy of Photoshop CS2.

Unboxing and placing the Mac Mini on top of my weird glass corner desk felt like receiving a ticket into a whole new world. I finally could do the things I saw designers do online. OS X felt like it was a gift from the gods. Everything was pretty, worked well, and instilled in me an appreciation for excellence that I hadn’t felt before and that is still going strong.

Looking back, that Mac Mini G4 wasn’t just a piece of tech; it was the starting point of my design journey. It turned my aspirations into real projects and set the standard for what I expect from technology. As the Mac celebrates its 40th, I realize it’s not just about the machine but about the doors it opened for me. It’s funny how a small box can play such a big part in your story.