Product/Design on alper.nl

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 08:35:06 +0200

The candidates who stand out are the ones who understood the problem before they started designing the solution.

The ability to incorporate new information fluidly, showing both conviction and flexibility, is one of the highest-signal moments in the entire loop.

I don’t see that much new here. Do you mean they weren’t screening for these things before?

https://open.substack.com/pub/theskip/p/what-pm-hiring-managers-actually

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 22:39:39 +0200

This is a really clean update for Mastodon with a well communicated set of changes. One of the things that I think caused a lot of grief is mixing up messages with normal posts so I’m glad they now fixed that.

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2026/08/5.0-laying-the-foundation/

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 00:07:19 +0200

A shift that I’ve seen around me as well where people get disillusioned with the ‘principles’ and flakiness of Google phones and just use iPhones instead.

https://マリウス.com/apple-iphone-air/

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 00:05:15 +0200

which means the best free Arabic font of the digital era is a one-man reconstruction of the best government-funded font of the metal era

A massive treatment of the difficulties of rendering Arabic text.

https://lr0.org/blog/p/arabic/

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 21:48:21 +0200

A beautiful story of how iteration on an app is a process that’s worth it and that can yield something close to perfection like with Pedometer++. I wish every app had a person like this behind it who goes the distance and sweats every detail.

https://www.david-smith.org/blog/2026/04/29/maps-on-watchos/

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 21:42:58 +0200

We have been working in the “What comes after” for as long as I can remember because 1. it’s obvious¹ 2. you need to be ruthless about anything that does not add value.

Join us on the other side if you dare.

https://death-of-scrum.net/#after

It just takes some thinking from first principles. Most of these things did not have names and I didn’t know the Reinertsen book existed until we had figured out most of it ourselves. ↩︎

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 21:31:38 +0200

The candidates who stand out are the ones who understood the problem before they started designing the solution.

The ability to incorporate new information fluidly, showing both conviction and flexibility, is one of the highest-signal moments in the entire loop.

Nothing new here. Haven’t people been screening for these things all this time now?

https://open.substack.com/pub/theskip/p/what-pm-hiring-managers-actually

Sat, 09 May 2026 17:02:43 +0200

This interview with Cat Wu, head of product at Claude Code, is interesting for some of the tidbits around how the different roles in software teams are changing. But there’s one thing that stood out for me.

She talks about how the stuff around “values” and “AGI” that Anthropic puts forward helps create alignment and speeds up decisions. The interesting thing is that this effect works even if the thing they’re describing (like AGI) is entirely fictitious. Stories work even if they’re not true (whatever true means).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PplmzlgE0kg

Sat, 09 May 2026 16:44:04 +0200

Knowing what to build, knowing when the system is telling you something, knowing when to cut, knowing when the fast path is the wrong path — these were never just “execution.” They were always the harder parts and to pretend they’re solved by AI is questionable, to say the least.

This is glib but no less true for it: “The Faster You Go, the Wronger You Get” and it’s unclear who will be able to internalize this lesson now if they weren’t able to do it previously. While it has become even more important it has in no way become easier.

Competitive advantage is still there and it’s fundamentally the same.

https://open.substack.com/pub/hagakure/p/the-bottleneck-was-understanding

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 13:26:54 +0200

The care for these kind of minute details of map design is part of what makes Google Maps such a standout product. What products do you use day to day where the makers sweat out the tiniest of details like this?

But to be more correct, none of this is “tiny”. Layout and legibility are the most important core features of a map even if they look tiny on the screen.

https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-label-readability

Thu, 15 Jan 2026 08:58:15 +0100

It’s amazing how bad a job Alan Dye did. He even sabotaged the most basic act of resizing a window on macOS.

https://noheger.at/blog/2026/01/11/the-struggle-of-resizing-windows-on-macos-tahoe/

They say his greatest achievement was political in convincing Apple leadership to give him this role and allow him to do such a bad job for such a long time. That may very well be right and I’m curious how you create that level of buy-in.

The man has a public Instagram account where his latest post about his move to Meta is lauded with congratulations. It’d be beneficial if more people would be honest to him.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DR2c3LmAWud/

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 19:53:03 +0100

It’s very cool to read how a capable web designer, like Anh here, leverages a static site generator for creative purposes.

https://anhvn.com/posts/2024/my-eleventy-site-setup/

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 19:23:21 +0100

Just through sheer coincidence I’m reading the notes on the closure of FF Studio.

I had no idea they existed nor had I seen any of their amazing work. I’m just glad that there are still people believing in novel, interesting ways of working.

Many of the positives and the negatives are all too familiar though stuff like this is easier said than done:

Take more risks
Be even more transparent
Experiment harder

Following some links, I found garden3d who take resisting the “traditional agency” thinking to something of a conclusion.

The “Traditional Agency™” reads a client’s RFP, sizes up the client’s wallet, and lobs a proposal over the wall. The agency has a lot of experience, and this client is a big company, so why not make an extra couple bucks?

We’re not a “Traditional Agency™”

UX Book Club Amsterdam First Meeting

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 09:41:07 +0000

This seems to have gotten stuck in my drafts with tons of other things. Fun to have a memory of the first UX Book Club meeting that I organised back in December 2009.

Fri, 24 Oct 2025 09:43:33 +0000

I still haven’t upgraded to the new iOS and seeing these reports, I’m not sure whether I should.

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/liquid-glass

Wed, 10 Sep 2025 16:43:05 +0000

The disabled creating custom prosthetics and turning themselves into highly visible and fashionable “neo-people” is at least one positive way that cyberpunk is turning into reality.

https://www.chinadailyhk.com/hk/article/618682

Sun, 07 Sep 2025 10:29:23 +0000

Not the first time Meta created racy bots and it will probably not be the last unless Taylor Swift sues them. I guess they do need to get more talent in to create things that are actually useful.

https://www.reuters.com/business/meta-created-flirty-chatbots-taylor-swift-other-celebrities-without-permission-2025-08-29

Sun, 07 Sep 2025 10:26:03 +0000

How much time for an innovative/edgy/creative agency to copy this (poorly) in Berlin?

https://www.wired.com/story/pursuit-scavenger-hunt-san-francisco

Sun, 07 Sep 2025 10:04:40 +0000

Congratulations to That Browser Company on what must be a stellar exit for them.

No idea what Atlassian can do with this because it is the place where technology goes to die.

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/04/atlassian-the-browser-company-deal.html

Wed, 13 Aug 2025 21:32:24 +0000

This may sound harsh, but it’s a lot fairer than they deserve: “But since the product is no longer jumping exponentially in capabilities, they will need to fall back on proper product development if they want to be competitive. They need to accept that they are software—plain old software—and that means people need to be able to use it.”

https://aboard.com/desperately-seeking-software/

Thu, 05 Jun 2025 22:15:08 +0000

It doesn’t really matter that much what is next for iOS. We should agree that flat design was a mistake.

https://www.lux.camera/physicality-the-new-age-of-ui

Thu, 05 Jun 2025 22:08:09 +0000

“Nightmare bicycle” is a concept that I won’t get out of my head quickly.

https://www.geoffreylitt.com/2025/03/03/the-nightmare-bicycle.html

Sat, 22 Mar 2025 08:37:01 +0000

A good overview of how Git developers configure git for themselves with a bunch of settings that should be the default for everybody but which will take ages to be rolled out. You should copy most of these into your own config.

https://blog.gitbutler.com/how-git-core-devs-configure-git

Fri, 14 Mar 2025 15:55:06 +0000

Chronicle of how you make a hit game. Balatro is amazing even if I ripped through it in a couple of days.

https://localthunk.com/blog/balatro-timeline-3aarh

Wed, 26 Feb 2025 23:10:33 +0000

I usually enjoy Cortex’s romps into productivity porn, but what struck me here is that they open with Grey discovering Asana and how he spent the week setting his business and life up in it.

Lots to unpack here:

People are still discovering Asana?

Grey immediately and deeply gets what is powerful about Asana and what tradeoffs that entails.

I think that everybody who refuses to use Asana is forced to cobble together a broken version of it themselves. That is true and will stay true.

https://www.relay.fm/cortex/164

Tue, 25 Feb 2025 22:44:37 +0000

A beautiful lush essay and homage to an ubiquitous typeface without a name.

https://aresluna.org/the-hardest-working-font-in-manhattan

Tue, 11 Feb 2025 08:30:17 +0000

We’ve revived our tech blog and will be sharing a bunch of stuff around our AI process and what it means to be an “AI first” company. Here’s an in-depth first piece about what it takes to develop a successful real life product with LLMs.

https://choco.com/us/stories/life-at-choco/scaling-ai-applications-with-llms

Sat, 18 Jan 2025 10:56:28 +0000

For those who want to introduce some whimsy into their programming and for whom using a variable width font in your code editor is a bit too far, there is now Comic Mono (via). It doesn’t even look all too terrible.

(After using Iosevka and Inconsolata for a long time, I’m now as are many people a happy Jetbrains Mono user.)

https://dtinth.github.io/comic-mono-font

Wed, 15 Jan 2025 09:59:08 +0000

Imagine shipping an app that is so bad that the CEO has to step down. Sonos has made it happen.

https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/13/24342179/sonos-ceo-patrick-spence-resignation-reason-app

Sat, 11 Jan 2025 13:57:52 +0000

It’s rare to find writing in German as lithe and delightful as what Christoph Rauscher puts out. The monthly lists are one particularly good example. I’m learning new and interesting words still in most of his pieces.

I totally agree that “Writing = Design” and you should hire him for Design/Writing/Illustration: https://christophrauscher.de/writing/

https://christowski.de/blog/2024/12/dezember-liste-2024/

Mon, 23 Dec 2024 09:30:57 +0000

Something that Ed Zitron has already mentioned, internet users are being trained very rapidly to suspect everything to be a scam. In the case of honey, it’s a Paypal owned online shopping extension that lies and deceives.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&si=NJa6RAHH1yS4-Vhx&v=vc4yL3YTwWk&feature=youtu.be

Mon, 16 Dec 2024 23:41:25 +0000

I made the mistake of opening the desktop Spotify app which does not really work anymore. The UI is broken and there’s lots of irrelevant stuff going on.

Technology should become more useful, not more exploitative. It’s a simple thing to ask for.

(At some point, your music app is just done.)

https://www.wheresyoured.at/never-forgive-them

Mon, 02 Dec 2024 22:42:42 +0000

Seeing if I can move from Arc to Vivaldi but there are half a dozen radical improvements in Arc that *make* the experience. It just shows how much innovation and solid thinking was packed in all of that frivolous design.

Vivaldi on the other hand has a million settings which mostly show that nobody knows wat this app is supposed to be doing. There are entire note taking apps and e-mail clients in there but none of them fun or nice to use.

Products truly live and die in the pixels.

Thu, 21 Nov 2024 22:08:49 +0000

Nicolas from All About Berlin has done so much to make living in this administrative nightmare bearable for people. It’s a very clear example of what kind of 10-100x improvements are there to be had.

https://nicolasbouliane.com/projects/all-about-berlin

Tue, 06 Aug 2024 17:05:27 +0000

Logitech already has a forever mouse. No need for an MBA CEO to reinvent the wheel.

The G500s I bought in 2013 is still going strong, the only thing that’s missing is updated and functioning software to go with it. Logitech’s own driver offering was always absurdly bloated and after a couple of years dropped support for this particular model.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/07/logitech-has-an-idea-for-a-forever-mouse-thatrequires-a-subscription/

Mon, 15 Apr 2024 18:03:50 +0000

Most people should not bother with specialized productivity software but just see how far they can get with what’s already on their phones: Reminders, Notes and the likes. Apple has made these unassuming tools absurdly powerful without losing too much on usability.

https://fredbenenson.medium.com/advanced-topics-in-reminders-and-to-do-lists-c5edec286670

Mon, 15 Apr 2024 17:49:18 +0000

Threads works functionally but as a product it’s very bad. As this article mentions being on Threads is a slow-motion exercise in going insane. Threads actively disables many things that make microblogging work and for the rest of the experience there’s very little thought that went into it other than “let’s make a text-based Instagram and see what happens”.

Threads makes Mastodon feel engaging (and that’s saying something).

https://maxread.substack.com/p/threads-is-the-gas-leak-social-network

Sun, 10 Mar 2024 09:55:59 +0000

The comments online around the Apple Vision Pro have been pretty deranged in a stupid kind of way. Lots of people jumped to the foregone conclusion that Apple released a failure or that it “wasn’t going to be a success”. Most of that seemed to have been motivated by clout chasing.

I don’t think that really matters that much other than serving to have the person making the comment show their ass for the entire world to see.

I feel that Apple Vision Pro is a deeply interesting and conflicted technology which is also the conclusion that Cortex reaches here. You’ll notice that Grey and Myke actually used the device and they are fairly knowledgeable about apps and ways of working/playing.

https://pca.st/0g7tgioh

I got to take one home for a weekend and I can testify similarly except for missing out on a bunch of features. Because it’s only out in the US, I could not access a paid App Store or get an Apple Arcade subscription. That means I could only get the free vision apps out there which are incredibly lacklustre.

What everybody seems to have done is to take whatever IP they had lying around, wrap it into a VisionOS starter project and throw it onto the App Store. That will probably be the modus operandi for a while going forward. If you look at the absolute dregs on the App Store and now realise that making a good VisionOS app is probably at least 10x as difficult as making a good iOS app, then things are not looking good.

The only really compelling experience was the Encounter Dinosaurs app which is genuinely disconcerting and scary. But because of its very high production values, it’s also only a couple of minutes long.

Most compelling is using the Vision Pro to consume media. Watching movies in Disney+ is a fantastic experience if the device wasn’t so uncomfortable to use. Being able to watch sporting events on a massive screen with sidecar screens and 3D views of the course/track seems like it would also be excellent. It would be even more interesting if we would see a proliferation of 360 cameras to be able to place yourself in a Formula1 car or on a sports pitch. The amount of embodiment it yields, seems like it could go a long way to make remote meetings feel more real.

I agree with this review that this device is a devkit. I’ll wait for the real deal.

&feature=youtu.be

Fri, 01 Mar 2024 17:55:52 +0000

After trying apps by Sony and Garmin I think that Apple should be the only hardware manufacturer who’s allowed to write software.

Tue, 26 Dec 2023 14:43:29 +0000

Late to the party but I very much love this interview with Karri Saarinen, the co-founder of Linear. Their way of working, “The Linear Method”, will be waved away by companies (“we can’t do that because…”) but with leadership with the right mentality and experience I don’t think it’s that far off at all. Ask your leadership how you can work like this.

Also I already know I’m going to use the term “side quest” a lot.

We don’t use Linear but we recently moved all our stuff from Jira to Github Projects which—even though it is mostly abandoned—is Linear-enough.

Most importantly, it is right on top of our codebase which is where I believe all engineering work should happen anyway.

Mon, 11 Dec 2023 16:50:13 +0000

Notion has formulas now (!) and here’s a formula to calculate a Cost of Delay column based on two other columns:

if(Value=="Killer" && Urgency=="ASAP", "1 Very High", if(Value=="Killer" && Urgency=="Soon" || Value=="Bonus" && Urgency == "ASAP", "2 High", if(Value=="Killer"&&Urgency=="Whenever"||Value=="Bonus"&&Urgency=="Soon"||Value=="Meh"&&Urgency=="ASAP", "3 Medium", if(Value=="Bonus"&&Urgency=="Whenever"||Value=="Meh"&&Urgency=="Soon", "4 Low", "5 Very Low"))))

Mon, 06 Nov 2023 08:27:23 +0000

As much as it pains me, I’m teaching myself Helix and trying out the Jetbrains IDEs. Code has been the first editor that really clicked for me but as with all free things, there’s a hidden price to pay for it.

(Also the quality of VS Code seems to be going downhill. At some point if they keep developing software past completion, the software becomes crap.)

https://ghuntley.com/fracture/

Sat, 21 Oct 2023 21:30:31 +0000

After trying so many note taking apps coming in back from nvAlt and friends, it’s fine to have found one that sticks with Obsidian. I have a relatively tricked out Obsidian setup (which I’ll maybe write about at some point) and for personal notes I’ve been using Bear also for years now.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90960653/why-people-are-obsessed-with-obsidian-the-indie-darling-of-notetaking-apps

Sat, 22 Jul 2023 09:28:49 +0000

Some good insights in reading about Flipkart’s popularity in India and how they achieved that.

https://newsletter.theindianotes.com/p/how-did-flipkart-convince-indians

Sat, 22 Jul 2023 09:14:22 +0000

The examples are hugely exaggerated for effect but the explanation of why so many people in software engineering keep themselves busy with solving imaginary problems is worth it.

https://cerebralab.com/Imaginary_Problems_Are_the_Root_of_Bad_Software

Sun, 16 Jul 2023 18:17:48 +0000

After using all kinds of note taking tools (eg. Notational Velocity) at some point some years ago I moved all my personal notes to Bear and it has been my secret productivity boost ever since.

I’m glad to see that they’ve held to the vision and didn’t compromise to get Bear 2 just right. It can be difficult to pull something like that through.

https://www.theverge.com/23786996/bear-2-notes-app-iphone-ipad-mac

Wed, 12 Apr 2023 14:33:46 +0000

Looking back over my notes and reactions from Interaction16 where I gave a talk calling chat interfaces the “UI for AI”. Feels good to be right.

/dingen/2016/03/notes-from-interaction16/

Sun, 26 Mar 2023 20:54:50 +0000

Ink & Switch is doing amazing work leveraging technology like CRDTs to create novel highly-interactive multiplayer interfaces. Here’s their work on Upswelling which is a git-like take on writing and editing.

https://www.inkandswitch.com/upwelling/

Sat, 04 Mar 2023 07:55:35 +0000

It’s super lovely that Berlin has a lab which does these kind of user tested innovations on city processes. The work that needs to be done is written up here and it’s relatively straight-forward (there are just no short-cuts).

What we need with the Bürgeramt though is not 10% more appointments but the automation of at least half of the processes there to no longer need human intervention. We needed that 10 years ago.

https://citylab-berlin.org/de/blog/das-burgeramt-der-zukunft-teil-2/

Sat, 18 Feb 2023 09:21:33 +0000

Going through these presentations by Matt Jones the main thing I’m left wondering is if anybody still does any real design and thinking work anymore, when it comes to technology or if all of it now is just flinging shit against the wall (which it very much looks like).

https://petafloptimism.com/2022/12/30/optometrists-octopii-rubber-ducks-centaurs-my-talk-at-design-for-ai-tu-delft-october-2022/