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curiousigor

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Senior product designer -> Design engineer.

I also build things for the web.

<igorstumberger.com>

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meet.hn/city/46.5576439,15.6455854/Maribor

Socials: - bsky.app/profile/igorstumberger.com - github.com/curiousigor - linkedin.com/in/igorstumberger

Interests: Technology, UI/UX Design, Web Development

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I had a similar experience but with design software (which I pirated at the time since I just didn't have the money to buy stuff from Adobe).

I'd install Photoshop and Illustrator on my shitty computer I put together from spare parts my dad didn't have the use of anymore from his business computers. It was horribly slow, but I kinda made it work slowly.

The thing is that I think this is what made me think a bit differently, since everything was slowed down and took more time than I would want it to, I had to make deliberate decisions on what to add/edit. I still work the same way today to pa point, but that's because I'm both faster, more experienced and the computers have gotten more performant (and because I can afford better devices sure).

When I look at my half-brother and his teenage generation I wonder if they can still have such an experience. The personal devices have gotten better and faster, most things are really convenient and you sometimes even don't have to think a lot to do something also because they're cheap to do... they probably won't have the experience of "grinding it out" just for the sake of producing something they like...maybe sports is the closest...no idea, but have been thinking about this quite a lot recently...

Built a free product (https://heymeta.com) to solve my own problem and posted it here on HN and Reddit as well as Product Hunt (that was in 2018 when it was still relevant).

Currently getting 15k/unique/month (it has dropped a bit less, but steadily getting up after the rewrite and bigfixes).

When the website doesn't have sponsors, I promote my other free macOS tool (https://dockey.publicspace.co) (with a donation option) that get quite a nice flow of visitors from it.

I'd call this a success, although it's not enough to pay the bills or anything :)

Working out some smaller bugs of my meta tags checker / builder HeyMeta, which I've rebuilt in Svelte (prevously used Node.js for both FE and BE and it was buggy as hell)

https://heymeta.com

Also revisited and updated Let's see, an eye trainer, which is basically a PWA you can "install" on your tablet/mobile/e-reader. I'm not a scientist, but have had some success training my eyes with this technique and wanted to make a simple app that I can share with my friends to try.

https://letssee.publicspace.co/

Any feedback welcome :)

Really good writeup and insights, thanks for this.

A friend of mine convinced me to enable kind of "donations" if you will for a free macOS app I've made a some time ago. I was not really trying to sell it or anything as it's a simple tool which you setup once and then that's it. But I figured that some might want to support my work and so I setup a Gumroad page with a suggested price of $2.99 and kinda forgot about it. The first $1 email that came through that felt very validating

It's PC with Calibre app + USB cable + Kindle = books transferred (not just drag and drop if you thought this as the old fashioned way).

It's a step between but think of Calibre as your own book "store". It's an ebook management app that can automatically convert almost any ebook format into the one your device needs but at the same time also gives you the option to edit the ebook details and stuff like that. It's honestly great, I'd totally recommend it.

While I'd love to use free tools, these really don't compare to the paid tools like the Affinity suite or Figma for example.

Especially in a professional setting as a designer, the tools I use are chosen to make my life easier and enable me to work more efficient, and these really don't yet. From what I see, they aren't build for this setting in mind and cannot keep up with paid tools that have significantly more of a financial backing.

The one open-source outlier for me is PenPot, but even they aren't there yet in my opinion, at least not for my needs (and preferences).

When I got my dad's old Series 3a, it was one of the coolest things I ever saw. We had a computer at home, so I knew MS-DOS and then Win 3.1, but it was another thing to have a computer in your pocket!

Then, when I was in high school, my dad was developing applications for the national gas and water utility companies and they used Psion Workabouts with printer attachments, since they were rugged and basically only device approved for working in places with gas. He wanted to get out of the business, so he basically said if I would take over the devleopment and clients, which I did. I rewrote the code for the Psions and wrote an app in Visual Basic for windows machines (I cannot recollect which database I used) so they could download the client readings via the serial port and print it out.

I never really got into "professional" development after that, sticking mostly to product design, but I still like to dabble in code. I guess the thrill of working on a product from start to end and have it used by so many people still gets fills me with joy.

Fun times and to think that this has to be more than 20 years ago is crazy!

Thanks for that. I share your thoughts on the content density in Arc vs Orion.

The solution you're proposing (kanban style) is intriguing and something I would find pretty useful. Might even make me switch to Orion back.

I switched from Orion mainly because Spaces don't share cookies and sessions with each other, meaning that I can have [Private][Work - General][Work - Client] and use for example Gmail in each of those with different accounts, without fear of switching to a personal/work one.

I also lost tabs in Orion when syncing multiple devices, which Arc has handled flawlessly. It's interesting, because they both use iCloud.

This sounds highly interesting. I'm having a bit of a hard time imagining how this would work for more than let's say 10 rules though, as sometimes they're just not that connected (thinking in nouns and verbs). How do you tackle this? Would you mind sharing an anonymized spreadsheet example?

That's a huge red flag for me though. If you're employed (so not working as a freelancer for the company), the employer is supposed to provide the equipment you can work on. For them to expect usage of personal devices and then have a requirement of installing these kind of tools on it wouldn't be expectable to me.

Trying to learn or build my skill around music production with Ableton. I've been in a alternative metal band for almost 8 years, but electronic music has always interested me since I have quite a few ideas in regards to melody and stuff like that (I'm the singer in my band).

I just applied to a course from Berkeley trough Corusera, and they are really great, but I'm not trying to rush trough, as this is my main way of trying to learn, making me lose interest because of the overflow of information.

If anyone has any good books, courses or tutorials on this, that would be a great help too :)

Are the funeral services keeping the bodies on ice because they want them buried or because they're waiting for them to be cremated? In this situation, where bodies are piling up, I'd understand the latter, but not the first. Then again (pardon my ignorance), I'm not from Spain so no idea what what the cultural thing in regards to funerals there is...

You're right, totally missed from the screenshot and based my comment on the current App Store data.

I looked the app on Appannie (non paid account) and the pricing history is quite interesting:

26 Mar 2017 - 0.99 to Free

29 Mar 2017 - Free to 0.99

19 Jul 2017 - 0.99 to 1.99

20 Jul 2017 - 1.99 to Free

02 Aug 2017 - Free to 0.99

04 Feb 2018 - 0.99 to Free

10 Feb 2018 - Free to 0.99

03 Mar 2018 - 0.99 to Free

27 Mar 2018 - Free to 0.99

04 Dec 2018 - 0.99 to Free

03 May 2019 - Free to 0.99

05 Sep 2019 - 0.99 to Free

From the above details, it was a paid app for most of it's time. I wonder why the developer played with the pricing as much though?

Snaplight is a free app though, so while the 10k number is high I think it would be hardly reached if he had placed a 99 cent tag on it, given the niche. Some people (me included) like to download and try new apps, only to remove them after the utility hasn't proven valuable enough.

That shouldn't stop you from finishing your app though. Building and later publishing an app to your audience can be an awesome experience. Go for it!

Raspberry Pi 4 7 years ago

I believe you can add your own filter files, so in this sense you could basically link the same ones right?