/Recent content on bad ui uxHugo -- 0.152.2en-usSun, 25 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000/posts/paradox-des-ai-layoffs/Sun, 25 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000/posts/paradox-des-ai-layoffs/Tailwind’s CEO hat 75% der Engineering Belegschaft entlassen müssen . Das ist einerseits tragisch für das Unternehmen selbst: wohl alle LLMs sind auf TailwindCSS trainiert, was die Nutzung von bezahltem Support, wie es Tailwind anbietet, vermehrt überflüssig macht. Andererseits ist es ein weiterer Tropfen ins Fass der AI-Layoffs. Ein weiteres Unternehmen, welches einen Großteil der Mitarbeitenden entlässt aufgrund von KI. KI verändert die Art der Arbeit. Viele Menschen sind verängstigt darüber, dass sie durch KI ihre Jobs verlieren. Und doch sind es Engineering-Experts, die entlassen werden. Nicht Junior oder Senior EntwicklerInnen, die klassische Anwendungsprogrammierung machen, also Apps, Webseiten oder Computerprogramme entwickeln, sondern tatsächliche EntwicklerInnen, die vermutlich in anderen Firmen mit Handkuss genommen werden (sollten)./posts/the-death-of-side-projects/Sun, 25 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000/posts/the-death-of-side-projects/ Side-Projects sterben Durch LLMs, Claude Code, Codex, Lovable und Co. sind sämtliche Side-Projects keine wirklichen Projekte mehr, in denen man Dinge ausprobiert, neues lernt und Spaß hat sondern nur noch Projekte des Promtings. Ließt man sich die HN Kommentare zu dem Post Your Sub is now my weekend project durch wird ersichtlich wie viele Leute so agieren. Dieser Wandel ist aber auch verständlich. So sind Side-Projects immer eine Frage der Zeit. Mit LLM’s ist es nun möglich viel mehr in viel kürzerer Zeit umzusetzen. Der Friedhof der Side-Projects wird dadurch vielleicht sogar immer kleiner. Die ganzen LLM generierten APPs / Side-Projects fluten gleichzeitig den Markt und lassen sicherlich an vielen Stellen zu wünschen übrig. Schließlich steckt in diesen Projekten viel weniger Energie und Herzblut./posts/project-dynamicland-working-digitally-analog/Wed, 21 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000/posts/project-dynamicland-working-digitally-analog/When I first heard of dynamicland I wasn’t really able to grasp what the project is about. After watching a set of videos I’m now completly hooked and wish for something like that near me. Sharing knowledge is so important. With remote work it feels a lot more isolated. I get less external input. I only learn what I want to learn (online) and miss the exchange with others. When visiting university, I learned the most not from lectures but from talking and discussing in between lectures during lunch break or practise sessions./posts/no-cross-platform-tiling-window-manager/Mon, 24 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000/posts/no-cross-platform-tiling-window-manager/I prefer using my keyboard over my mouse. It’s faster and more ergonomic. I use a MacBook for personal projects and Windows at work. There are so many tiling window managers available, yet I haven’t found a good one that supports cross platform usage. MacOS tiling window managers: Yabai Amethyst AeroSpace Just to name a few of the most famous (and most starred) one. The single most annoying part of using different operating systems is to adapt to different keyboard shortcuts (and keycodes), different programs and implementations. This also mean that in general you have to learn two different window tiling manager programs on both platforms, different behaviour and shortcuts (or at least spend time to remap those). On Windows, GlazeWM and Komorebic are those that I tried and know the best. A few weeks ago the developer of komorebic announced upcoming support for macOS that is already available for sponsors. This is exciting news! Looking forward to try it in the near future and hopefully be able to stick to it./posts/elontime.io/Thu, 20 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000/posts/elontime.io/Someone created the website elontime.io to convert Elon Musk time in real time. This is so great. Next is the website elonnumbers.io to convert Elon Musk announcement numbers to real numbers and capacity. By the middle of next year [end of 2020], Musk says over a million Tesla cars will be on the road with full-self driving hardware, which means, there’s the potential of one million robotaxis by then1. https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-autonomy-investor-day-live-updates-event-details-elon-musk-self-driving-2019-4  ↩︎/posts/missing-shortcut-hints/Sun, 16 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000/posts/missing-shortcut-hints/Until this day, I do not understand why there’s no shortcut indicator/hint in the macOS System Settings search bar placeholder. I use the search all the time since I can’t find a thing in the mess of macOS’s system settings1. Many macOS apps use the cmd+l2 shortcut to activate the search. macOS itself uses cmd+f. This is the typical Find shortcut, to activate the search in the System Settings app and other apps, such as the Finder. While this might be obvious, there could also be an indicator right besides the search placeholder, such as Search (cmd+f)./posts/italian-company-bendingspoon-buys-aol/Wed, 29 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000/posts/italian-company-bendingspoon-buys-aol/Nothing new: after getting komooted , BendingSpoons buys AOL . I just had a look at the list of people and investors. List of people 1, taken from: https://bendingspoons.com/people List of people 2, taken from: https://bendingspoons.com/people I think this mix reflects quite well what the company does: Buying great companies with lots of users Reducing Selling, General & Admin and (OPEX), keeping the services running without introducing new features Selling and milking user data/posts/youtube-is-dead-thank-you-youtube./Fri, 24 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000/posts/youtube-is-dead-thank-you-youtube./ I hate this feature and I wished YouTube would get rid of it or provide a way to disable it. This is the kind of dictation that reduces the overall user experience. When I wrote my post on the YouTube auto dubbing I couldn’t imagine thanking YouTube for this feature. YouTube lost their soul throughout the years with strange business decisions, their push against ad blockers, and awful creator support. Just to mention a few./posts/a-missed-opportunity-with-faceid/Sat, 11 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000/posts/a-missed-opportunity-with-faceid/When Apple released the iPhone X with the all new FaceID I was amazed at how good FaceID was. It almost felt like magic and I never had any problems with it besides COVID-19 masks1. Soon after the iPhone was released, I tried different apps that used the FaceID sensors. There was a browser app which used the sensor’s API to let the user control the browser with his or hers eyes. You could look at a button and focus it for a few ms to “click” it, you could look at the bottom of the page to scroll down, you could navigate the whole page and interact with it only using your eyes. This experience wasn’t yet production ready, indeed after a few minutes it was tiring for the eyes. Yet, it was a unprecedented showcase of what might be possible with these sensors in the near future./posts/power-to-the-users-feature-toggles/Fri, 03 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000/posts/power-to-the-users-feature-toggles/A feature toggle is a non-visible option to enable or disable. In software development, they are commonly used to enable features without the need of an update for a group of users, testers or internal developers to be able to use (new) functionality before it is fully deployed to everyone. This is useful in many scenarios: enable a new feature only for beta testers with the possibility to add more and more non-beta testers without another rollout. let developers and support teams use debug information to understand bugs release half-finished features to be able to test in the real world without any user noticing rollback a feature after negative user feedback or when something does not work as expected There are even SaaS companies that specialize on feature toggles./posts/planned-obsolescence-or-how-many-resources-are-wasted/Tue, 23 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000/posts/planned-obsolescence-or-how-many-resources-are-wasted/By now I’ve read a ton of reviews about {i;mac;iPad;vision;watch}OS, how people love it and others hate it. I spent hours with it while friends and family haven’t even heard of it. Now, that it’s released for a few days I wanted to note down my thoughts on this in a broader way. Why they did this With all the positive and negative feedback on the internet, I always wished to know some of the designers working on Liquid Glass to ask all the important questions:/posts/the-need-for-small-phones/Sat, 13 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000/posts/the-need-for-small-phones/When it comes to smartphone screen sizes, there’s no frontier model with a screen smaller than 6". Most of them have at least a 6,3" screen. Long are the times gone that devices are controllable with one hand - especially for folks with small hands. When Apple introduced their iPhone Mini 12 and a year later the iPhone Mini 13 they were on the right track: they hit a niche with a high demand. Now, that the iPhone (17) Air has been released, people once again gather together to show their wish for smaller (i)Phones1. It’s this time of a year that I think a lot about why this group is simply ignored./posts/the-fake-infinite-scroll-on-the-iphone-alarm-app-time-picker/Fri, 05 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000/posts/the-fake-infinite-scroll-on-the-iphone-alarm-app-time-picker/This week this Reddit post about the time picker inside the iPhones alarm app made the round. It was posted on HN and some old StackOverflow questions like this and this were linked. I didn’t know that the time picker is just a long list. I find it funny, but I can fully understand why one would decide to implement it like this. The overall effort feels so much lower compared to the complexity of the circular logic and is also less error-prone./posts/youtubes-auto-translation-dictation/Fri, 29 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000/posts/youtubes-auto-translation-dictation/I think there’s a narrow path between improving UX to help users and over-improving UX which results in frustrated users. I think this is what happened with YouTube’s automatic translation of video titles and descriptions feature. This feature already exists for at least 1-2 years, however, it still frustrates me. Video titles and their descriptions get translated with quite bad translations (in my case from English to German) without providing any benefit. There’s no way to disable this feature (for specific languages) or to toggle the original title / description like many websites are doing it nowadays1./posts/i-lost-all-my-safari-browser-tabs/Thu, 28 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000/posts/i-lost-all-my-safari-browser-tabs/Today I lost all my > 100 Safari tabs on my iPhone. I’m still blown away by this. I didn’t think something like this is still possible. It looks like it’s an iCloud sync issue. On reddit people mention that it’s possible to restore the tabs by closing Safari or even restarting the phone. Since I didn’t grasp immediately what was happening I opened a new tab, thus, overwriting the Safari iCloud tabs state. The Safari history also doesn’t let me reopen all my tabs that I have recently closed. This is something you can do with Chrome tabs./posts/i-stopped-using-kagi-search-back-to-a-regular-search-engine/Sun, 24 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000/posts/i-stopped-using-kagi-search-back-to-a-regular-search-engine/I decided to stop using Kagi Search instead of Google Search. In April, I started to use Kagi search as my primary search engine . This is due to the fact that it benefits myself not as much as I’d be happy to pay for. Most of my day-to-day searches are simple searches that do not need in-depth results. I’m not working in research or any area that requires me to find the one paper or article on the web that I need. Most of the time I use a search engine to find a specific site, e.g. when booking a hotel or looking for documentation, or I look up some general information, e.g. back exercises, a nice cooking receipt or the weather./posts/unable-to-connect-to-ios-mobile-hotspot-when-macos-bluetooth-is-disabled/Mon, 18 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000/posts/unable-to-connect-to-ios-mobile-hotspot-when-macos-bluetooth-is-disabled/I experienced this before, but it was only now that I realised I’m unable to connect to my iPhone’s personal hotspot from my MacBook Pro since it had Bluetooth disabled. The generic error alert when connecting to a Wi-Fi network fails. When the Bluetooth is turned back on, connecting to the iPhone hotspot works flawlessly. For me this is odd behavior. First, connecting to other non-hotspot networks (“classical” Wi-Fi networks), Bluetooth is not required. Secondly, the error is just a generic “it didn’t work” message. With Handoff, AirDrop and all the other iOS and iPadOS integrations, I’d expected a more meaningful message when the connection to an iOS hotspot fails. What makes this less understandable for me as a user is the fact that the iPhone is visible as a possible hotspot network. The macOS device already knows the device is around, yet it isn’t capable of connecting to it./posts/bad-ui-in-real-life/Sat, 16 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000/posts/bad-ui-in-real-life/I once wrote about the bad list layout of YouTube’s search filter screen , now I experienced a real-life bad UI in a gym I went for the first time. The weights rack at a training machine in a gym in Stockholm. In the first moments I was unable to identify the correct yellow lever I need to turn to “enable” my desired weights. The distance between lever and weight label is so far apart that I sometimes either used my finger to not slip to a different row or counting the rows from top. The acute angle, looking from the top, distorts the view even more. I think the weight stack could have been improved by placing the labels on the left of the levers. When the levers are turned off, they are closer to the label./posts/how-to-improve-googlemaps-incident-reporting-with-voice-interactions/Sat, 09 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000/posts/how-to-improve-googlemaps-incident-reporting-with-voice-interactions/Google pushes the development of the Google Maps mobile app in the last few months. I noticed this for the incident reporting. It’s not only possible to report incidents, crashes, traffic jams, or obstacles on the street, but also reporting whether a reported incident is still present. Google is able to collect such a large amount of data through Google Maps users they can use to predict and show real-time traffic (red / yellow polyline)1. Once again, providing a “free” product works. The user is paying with their (traffic) data2./posts/2025-stackoverflow-survey-results-are-now-available/Tue, 05 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000/posts/2025-stackoverflow-survey-results-are-now-available/The StackOverflow Survey 2025 results are now available. This year, none of the results really surprise me. The AI usage between professionals, students and other groups is interesting, however, besides that, nothing really struck my eyes. It’s still worth it to take a look at it. Regardless of the content, I like the usage of Sanky Charts in the Worked with vs. want to work with chapter . I think that Sanky Charts are a great way to represent the flow of amounts from one side to another. I know them from the annual reports of public stock companies./posts/a-lot-of-steps-for-a-simple-goad-komoots-route-planer-ux/Mon, 28 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000/posts/a-lot-of-steps-for-a-simple-goad-komoots-route-planer-ux/A long time ago I wanted to make a post about the bad UX of the route planer inside the Komoot app. I took a few screenshots of it. Now that Komoot is almost dead it’s the last chance to write about it. When I try to plan a route, I’d expect it to be these steps: Click “Plan new route” button Click “Choose starting point” Click the search bar (or any other way to select the starting point) Enter address, select search result: the selected address is added as the starting point Click “Choose destination” Click the search bar (or any other way to select the destination) Enter address, select search result: the selected address is added as the destination What Komoot is doing:/posts/getting-komooted/Sun, 27 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000/posts/getting-komooted/The acquisition of Komoot by Bending Spoons made many people disappointed. Around 80% of Komoot’s employees lost their job, the 6 founders were each paid 20-30 million USD and a community-based app is doomed to death. Personally I’ve always been quite connected with Komoot. I planned many routes with Komoot, followed their story as a startup almost from the beginning and work in the software development of route calculation, turn-by-turn navigation, mapping technology and so on. Many times, Komoot served me as inspiration as local startup in the Berlin area and as a thriving community tech company./posts/do-things-and-talk-about-them/Thu, 17 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000/posts/do-things-and-talk-about-them/Codus Operandi aka The Luck Surface Area is a must read on the idea of increasing your luck. From the article: … I’ve gone one step further and formalized the concept into the equation L = D * T, where L is luck, D is doing and T is telling. This demonstrates clearly that the more you do and the more people you tell about it, the larger your Luck Surface Area will become. And while I like equations, it’s the graphical representation that really brings the concept home./posts/macos-isnt-made-for-two-accounts-using-the-same-apple-account/Thu, 17 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000/posts/macos-isnt-made-for-two-accounts-using-the-same-apple-account/I use a macOS device with two users: one for work and one for personal stuff. With this I can simply switch context without being distracted by the other things. During working hours I don’t watch YouTube, in the evening I work on my own projects or watch YouTube. Both accounts are connected with the same Apple Account since I need notes, calendar, iCloud Drive and especially my developer account. When setting this up you almost immediately know this is not how you should use macOS: both accounts share the same user profile picture./posts/on-the-feature-complexity-of-secondary-features/Tue, 08 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000/posts/on-the-feature-complexity-of-secondary-features/I was thinking about my article on the concept of automatic keyboard language switch by iOS and wanted to share my thoughts on feature complexity of secondary features, i.e. features that are not used or expected by every user. Whenever a secondary feature shall be implemented, it’s always not as easy as it seems from an UX perspective. There are users with a good technical understanding that benefit from a feature and there are users that do not benefit from a feature or will even be confused by the feature. Sometimes fewer features is more./posts/time-boxed-projects/Fri, 04 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000/posts/time-boxed-projects/When working as a freelancer, time tracking is always part of the daily business unless you’re not paid by an hourly rate. Personally, I use the macOS app Tim since it is a nicely designed time tracking tool that includes everything I need. When I work on personal projects I’ve never worked with time tracking. Tracking time for personal1 projects can reduce your Opportunity Fear Of Missing Out , as you can better estimate the time needed for a project and know when to bury a project and move on./posts/opportunity-fear-of-missing-out/Tue, 01 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000/posts/opportunity-fear-of-missing-out/Opportunity Fear Of Missing Out (Opportunity FOMO ) is something I came up with the last time an idea was stuck in my head and made me unable to focus on my projects1 for a few days. More commonly, this is known as entrepreneurial obsession, the obsession to jump on the bandwagon with a new idea that came to your mind. In 2023, someone asked on HN how to deal with entrepreneurial obsession? . Especially the user asked how to deal with thinking about the idea that takes you away from what you’re doing and won’t let you think of anything else. You even think that this new idea IS your next big thing, and you should drop everything you’re working on right now and fully commit to this new idea./posts/spotifys-new-episode-indicator-does-not-vanish/Wed, 25 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000/posts/spotifys-new-episode-indicator-does-not-vanish/This is the fourth post on my never ending Spotify building bad UI and UX following my posts on Spotify’s new Create button , the long road to add an item to a playlist and changing the view while the user interacts with the app . Now I’m back with something new: the blue dot that is not indicating that a new episode or album was released. The Blue Dot The blue dot next to an artist or podcast is a good indicator to know when something new is released./posts/a-deepler-look-into-deepls-translation-interface/Sun, 22 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000/posts/a-deepler-look-into-deepls-translation-interface/I recently built a web text editor with LLM integration. It is a simple editable div. You can write text with basic markdown support like * and ** for bold and italic. I wanted to implement a feature to automatically open a context menu when moving the mouse above a sentence. The context menu should then be used to trigger a LLM to rewrite the sentence. The text is stored as markdown without any deeper structure./posts/a-guide-to-auto-renew-qnap-nas-tailscale-certificates/Sun, 22 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000/posts/a-guide-to-auto-renew-qnap-nas-tailscale-certificates/ Auto-Renew QNAP NAS TailScale Let’s Encrypt Certificates In this guide, I set up a cronjob to automatically issue and renew the TailScale TLS certificate to access my QNAP NAS via ita TailScale name with a valid TLS/SSL (https://) certificate./posts/pentagons-pizza-attack/Thu, 19 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000/posts/pentagons-pizza-attack/I’m late to the pizza party. A few days ago, everyone was talking about the Pentagon Pizza Report or Pizza Index. Every time I read something similar to this, I have a Eureka moment thinking oh my gosh, this digital world is so crazy. Two weeks later, when I’m back to normal I’m already less aware of these things. Another report that is stuck in my head is the US president’s bodyguard being tracked via their Strava activity. I wonder how much do all these secret intelligence services know (obviously they know almost everything) and how much does each of the digital businesses know1. If there’s a pizza index, then there must be a Uber index, Google maps and Apple maps index. Maybe even Spotify knows this since the Pentagon employees do not listen to music or podcasts while driving home./posts/whys-there-no-automatic-keyboard-language-switch-on-ios/Thu, 19 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000/posts/whys-there-no-automatic-keyboard-language-switch-on-ios/I like autocorrection and completion on my iPhone. It helps me type way faster with way less typing errors. I’m missing a feature that would probably improve typing even more. It happens quite often that I switch between the german and english keyboard on iOS. I message in german and write technical notes in english, my todos are a mix of boths. Writing a todo in german with a english word in it, such as function, results in an word correction by iOS. This is not what I want. I want to use english words within a german sentence. I do not want to switch to the english keyboard just for the word function and then switch back to german. Especially, when the keyboard switch is quite slow1. There should be an option to prevent auto correction for words in the languages that you have activated as keyboards./posts/ai-bots-do-not-know-their-environment/Wed, 18 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000/posts/ai-bots-do-not-know-their-environment/I couldn’t open the upload file dialog in chrome and looked online for a solution and found this from the google chrome support center . A AI answer with broad steps and the final note to contact google support if none of the solutions work. This is just hilarious. What’s next? My banks voice AI support bot telling me that I should try to call the bank’s telephone support? Well, it’s already happening./posts/first-thought-on-liquid-glass-ios-and-macos-26/Mon, 09 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000/posts/first-thought-on-liquid-glass-ios-and-macos-26/Today, Apple introduced their delightful and elegant new software design for iOS 26 and macOS 26 on the WWDC25. My first impression is simple: it’s hard to read button labels when the background is almost transparent. But see yourself: The music app. Image by Apple The photos app. Image by Apple A website in Safari app. Image by Apple The glassy buttons have a glass-like border and blurred background, making text extremly hard to read and adding mirroring of the background just like on water. You can see this especially at the bottom border of the Music app’s image. The cover images are mirrored a second time./posts/lisabon-the-capital-of-spain-at-least-on-deepl/Mon, 09 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000/posts/lisabon-the-capital-of-spain-at-least-on-deepl/Well, not everything works perfect. It looks like Spain is the capital of Lisbon using the German->Swedish translator on DeepL. Translation from German to Swedish Correct translation from German to English Sadly, Google Translator does not provide an "Alternatives" section (at least not on their web interface)./posts/spotify-doing-bad-ux-things/Sun, 18 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000/posts/spotify-doing-bad-ux-things/Spotify added a new button to their mobile app - AFAICT on all devices, not only A/B testing. The new button is part of the navigation bar: The new create tab button Most of the times I open Spotify, I want to play a playlist or music from my saved songs. I automatically tap the bottom-right of the screen without even looking. This is a simple user habbit . Instead, I now open the “Create” Modal. I hate it. I would love to see the stats of people accidentially tapping on this just before they navigate to the “Your Library” tab compared the those who tap the “Create” Tab consciously./posts/kaios-is-almost-dead/Sat, 17 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000/posts/kaios-is-almost-dead/When I wrote my first blog post on my experience using a feature phone, it was also the first time that I was introduced to KaiOS and the whole feature phone / dumb phone community. During my 10 weeks without a smartphone, I learned a lot about KaiOS and it was almost perfect. It supported WhatsApp, Email, Google Maps, it could play music and it had Google Assistant1. If I’d wish for one more feature, it would be NFC or any type of wallet app (flight tickets, credit card, etc.)./posts/strava-is-able-to-make-its-subscription-as-unattractive-as-possible/Tue, 13 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000/posts/strava-is-able-to-make-its-subscription-as-unattractive-as-possible/Strava is heavily promoting their subscription plan in their app to get better insights into your workouts and support from their Athlete Intelligence - I find this LLM branding just as funny as Apple’s Apple Intelligence . When clicking on an activity, you see a locked section that shows features of their Workout Analysis. Strava's smarter insights section after selecting an activity. What I don’t understand: Why don’t they use personal data for the Athlete Intelligence, Workout Analysis, and Flyover features? Promoting these premium features with insights that are not based on my activities feels weird. Using my data would make me much more curious. Provide me with some insights to awake the desire to see more: I want to learn from the analysis, improve myself, know where I can improve the most to really understand why I’d need these features./posts/i-want-to-learn-a-language-by-translating-web-content/Mon, 12 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000/posts/i-want-to-learn-a-language-by-translating-web-content/I currently try to learn swedish. I want to use a browser extension to automatically translate simple words while reading on the web. There’s Toucan by Babbel that does exactly this. There’s also https://nuenki.app/ that was recently posted on HN . It translates sentence-by-sentence instead of word based. I’d definetely would prefer using a HN user’s product over the Babbel product. However, the pricing starting at 5€/month is quite expensive adding to all these other subscription-based services due to the subscription business model trend . For nuenki, the recurring subscription fee is probably mostly used to pay for the LLM usage. As a user, this is sadly only a excuse. On top of that, I also know that I don’t really want to rely on the translations provided by the LLM from my own experience and also by others . And to add to this, I try to be as little dependent on big LLM companies as possible./posts/context-aware-app-translations/Sun, 11 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000/posts/context-aware-app-translations/Recently I started to improve the translations for an app that I’m working on. The translation files are i18n json files that store key-value pairs with the translation in the corresponding language. While our team keeps the de.json and en.json in sync with development, we’re not fluent in any other language. It’s the first time I got a little deeper into translating an app. It struck me, how hard it is to accuratly translate as soon as the translation requires specific context. It looks like there’s no easy solution, easy meaning low effort or high pricing where you can trust the translators./posts/experience-with-vibe-coding-a-chrome-extension/Fri, 09 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000/posts/experience-with-vibe-coding-a-chrome-extension/I’ve built a chrome extension only with AI tools. I used Cursor as my primary code editing IDE and sometimes switched to VS Code with Github Copilot. With cursor, I mostly relied on Antrophics Claude 3.7 . Overall, my general assumption was confirmed that most models only help for smaller task and aren’t (yet) capable of understanding overall concepts of an application. For me, these tools are helpful to write some boilerplate code, rename or refactor some function or write simple scripts without any side effects./posts/meta-ai-announces-dead-ai-content-social-network/Mon, 05 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000/posts/meta-ai-announces-dead-ai-content-social-network/Meta has announced the release of its Meta AI app. This is a trend all of these LLM players are doing. I’d expect it generates more traffic since it’s easier for a user to access ChatGPT, Gemini, etc. via its companion app instead of using the web interface. Also, from a user perspective it’s easier to upload a photo from your camera roll and using your smartphone’s microphone as well feels more natural./posts/what-does-a-llm-know-about-you-compared-to-a-search-engine/Mon, 05 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000/posts/what-does-a-llm-know-about-you-compared-to-a-search-engine/I think about how much more a LLM knows about me compared to a traditional1 search engine. I provide the llm way more information compared to a search engine since I use it way more interactively. A search engine does not provide me with results based on a previous query. The queries are always isolated and not based on each other2. That’s different with llms. I could ask for a list of restaurants in my area. And then follow up with filters for this list, e.g. asking for restaurants (from the initial list) that are open this evening and provide vegan dishes. Using a search engine, I’d start with the same first query, asking for a list of restaurant recommendations, but then I would look at the recommendations one by one by myself. I definitely could also ask the search engine in the first place for “a list of vegan restaurants” but as soon as I’d ask for “a list of vegan restaurants opened tonight” some - if not all - search engine won’t be able to provide me with valid results. Thus, the llm learns more from me than the search engine (in this example, it would know that I might eat a restaurant tonight). This is just a simple example but I think interacting with the llm let them learn so much more from us than we think. Probably, you can compare it to humans interacting with each other. If you have a conversation, reacting on the things the other person is saying, you learn more than just telling / listening without a reaction./posts/the-moment-when-ux-is-traded-for-profit/Thu, 01 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000/posts/the-moment-when-ux-is-traded-for-profit/The article by Jayden Milne about YouTube’s change in videos on its frontpage and it’s current HN thread made me think about the times a good User Interface and User Experience is traded for profit. Reading the comments on HN, it looks like everyone is dissatisfied and annoyed by the way YouTube is changing over the years. Important things are shorts, bad recommendations, ads, and of course the work against ad blockers like ublock. Back in the days, YouTube was a content platform. Nowadays, YouTube’s number 1 goal is to sell advertisement spots and show them to as many people as possible. Obviously, there’s some kind of conflict of objectives. They want the user’s to stay on the site, watch their favorite YouTubers for many hours and at the same time deliver ads and recommend videos the user inwardly doesn’t want to watch. Let them watch what they want is not as lucrative as if they showed the most ad-suitable content. Showing and recommending more ad-suitable content might lose users and clicks over time. There’s the typical balancing between two worlds./posts/add-a-date-to-your-blog-post/Mon, 28 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000/posts/add-a-date-to-your-blog-post/I don’t like blog posts without a date. For me, this is bad UX. There’s no reason why one would not provide a date at the top of the post. As a reader, I always want to know if the webpage i’m looking at is up to date. If it’s some kind of tutorial I want to know, if it is already out of date. When I visit a blog, I want to know if the blog is still active by looking at the most recent article. Nothing else./posts/text-labels-icons/Sat, 26 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000/posts/text-labels-icons/The statement The more icons within an interface, the more difficult it can be to navigate. is so true. With each icon it get’s more complex to understand what’s happening. Think about the Windows file dialog (right click on a file or desktop). Not every action has its own icon. Only a few primary actions have one to better differentiate between them. With In Defense of Text Labels Christopher Butler wrote a great article on Why icons are often irritating and labels are just better (most of the time). Go check it out./posts/no-translator-for-swedish-on-ios/Thu, 24 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000/posts/no-translator-for-swedish-on-ios/Well, why is Apple not capable of translating from/to Swedish. At least they could use a existing translation service./posts/how-quickly-ux-patterns-become-habits-steve-jobs-presentation-of-the-first-iphone/Mon, 21 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000/posts/how-quickly-ux-patterns-become-habits-steve-jobs-presentation-of-the-first-iphone/I once again watched the presentation of the first iPhone on YouTube. I watch it once in a while since it is iconic and I simply like the way Steve Jobs gave presentations back then. This time I saw something I haven’t noticed before. After he introduced the iPhone, the iPhone is connected to the presentation and he shows the call app, how to watch videos, how to play and rate music, how to move through cover flow and how to scroll contacts. At one time he opens a detail page in the iPod app (i.e. music app), similar like my amazing drawing: From the left list view you can access the right detail view by tapping on one of the list items. At all times the right-most tab is selected (that’s why it’s highlighted in orange). Then you can go back - as we all know - by tapping on the back button in the top left corner (indicated by the dotted arrow). In most cases, you’re also able to do a swipe gesture from the left border of the screen to the right to trigger the back navigation. With the tab bottom bar 1 the iPod app provides a third navigation method. Tapping on the already selected tab to pop everything from the navigation stack besides the top most view of the tab. This is different behaviour compared to the back button and the swipe gesture for a navigation stack of size > 2. For a single detail view (navigation stack of 2), all three methods behave the same. Coming back to the presentation, at one point Steve Jobs chooses to tap on the tab instead of using the back button2 which somehow is kind of not ideal./posts/ai-history-repeats/Tue, 15 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000/posts/ai-history-repeats/TechCrunsh reports that nate.tech fooled their investors by saying they’re using AI and instead used a call center in the Philippines. From their website it looks like you could let nate buy things by sharing (?) the url with the nate app. Maybe there was also a chatbot integration. This all reminds me of GoButler, a german company that had it’s hype around 2015. You could send them a text message and they would do everything for you. Booking a flight, ordering food, planing your next holiday. They even expanded their business to NYC but closed their doors in Germany in 2016. It’s interesting how all the people are always trying similiar things. This time with “AI” (or a Philippines call center). GoButler still has their german instagram account available. And you can buy the gobutler.de domain for around 2000€./posts/google-maps-new-back-button-design/Sun, 13 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000/posts/google-maps-new-back-button-design/I gave the new Google Maps redesign a try. It’s one of those let’s do something new just to do something new redesigns. I try to understand why they changed the back button to a misplaced x-icon. Have a look at the image. The left image is the one that is a so-called detail view of a (public traffic) route. Previously there was a back button at the top left. Now there is a close button on to far right at the top of the bottom sheet . For me, a close button indicates to get back to the top most layer - in this case poping the whole navigation stack that lead from the general map view to this detailed route view. I’d expect the same behavior when closing the bottom sheet. Instead, a single navigation pop is performed getting me back to where I was before: the route overview (image in the middle). Since the route overview (image in the middle) is only one step away from the top navigation stack page, a click on the close icon in this case get’s you (correctly incorrectly) back to the map view without any selection. When you select a POI on the map (right image) you actually can navigate back via a back button. Why don’t you now use a close button instead?/posts/thoughts-on-reflecting-on-wikitok/Mon, 07 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000/posts/thoughts-on-reflecting-on-wikitok/In a previous post I wrote about the WikiTok idea. The creator of wikitok.io wrote about his learnings on his blog. While the implementation details might be skipped, the Lessons on Going Viral provides great insights into how he dealt with going viral and what to expect. I took from it that it’s ridiculous how fast some people jump on the hype-train, incorrect information is spread (by other people) and how fast the viral hype is over again./posts/youtubes-search-filter-list-layout-on-tablet-devices/Mon, 07 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000/posts/youtubes-search-filter-list-layout-on-tablet-devices/YouTube applies the same layout concept for both its smartphone app and its tablet app. However, some best practices for the layout just do not apply to bigger devices. I think everyone knows this stretched layout: You could improve this layout by adding some dividers: This looks great! But wait. Have you tried this on a large (horizontal) 10" screen? Now, it’s harder to select the correct value. Sometime I have to count the number of rows on both sides to know which row I should select. Maybe I need a ruler. And if you add the dividers.. ..you’ll see that the dividers do not really help in this case anymore. While moving your eyes from the left (the label) to the right (the action/value) you can so easily mess up the rows. When you look at the YouTube’s app search filter settings, you can see how bad this layout inside a real app. Can you only look at the values (right side of the image) and guess the correct row’s of the checkmarks?/posts/boring-meta-ai/Sun, 06 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000/posts/boring-meta-ai/WhatsApp has a new feature called “Meta AI” which is a Llama LLM model. The AI can be used in a chat manner (you can archive or delete the chat) to ask questions (just like ChatGPT and others). It can also be triggered via WhatsApp search. This feature is so underwhelming. Not the way I had expected it to be integrated. I had expected it to be way more similar to my “What if?” series:/posts/getdropboxs-first-hn-post/Sun, 06 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000/posts/getdropboxs-first-hn-post/Reading this is amazing. For someone who started learning programming in 2014 this comes from a time way before me ever writing my first program. Being able to read these old posts is inspiring. With the knowledge from today I read the comments completely different (typical hindsight bias). What startup from today will make it till 2035? Maybe then someone will read a thread of a startup making their first product launch or asking for feedback on HN with the same eyes as I did with the post on getdropbox.com./posts/is-it-slack-or-is-it-apple-photos/Sun, 30 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000/posts/is-it-slack-or-is-it-apple-photos/For the first time I accidentally opened slack instead of the iOS photos app on my iPhone because I mixed the two logos up. I wonder if this had any legal consequences in the past. You could also rotate / flip the icons to match even more. They all come with the color combination blue to green to yellow to red. And look at the similarity between Slack and Google Photos icon. This time I rotated and flipped the Google Photos icon./posts/the-new-product-line/Sun, 02 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000/posts/the-new-product-line/After the new iPhone 16e release I thought about Tim Cook’s announcement on X . Is the newest member of the family here to stay and be a part of the product line? Will there be an iPhone 17e in September or at least iPhone 18e next year? It’s unlikely as it is the successor of the iPhone SE 2022 and it was introduced in February instead of September but who knows for sure./posts/the-new-iphone-16expensive/Sun, 23 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000/posts/the-new-iphone-16expensive/I thought about buying the new iPhone SE 2025 which is now named iPhone 16e. Until recently I used my iPhone X, upgraded to a used iPhone 13 Pro and would love to upgrade to a newer model. However, the pricing is just out of this world. Like everybody else in the tech bubble I’m too saying 699€ (or similar amount in $) is just too much. Inflation is a thing but not a justification for this price. Still waiting for the next iPhone mini. Sadly, this won’t happen anymore. The only highlight is reading the web’s option about Apple’s pricing policy and business economics./posts/personal-work-text-to-speech/Sat, 22 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000/posts/personal-work-text-to-speech/If I want one thing it’s speech-to-text integrated in my daily work. I think thinking out loud is the fastest way to get your thoughts in the right order. I would improve my workflow in a simple way: have a keyword to trigger voice input to be able to fill a text input field and to write down (non-technical) notes. If the text is editable by voice it would be a plus. But it needs to be simple and fail-safe. Maybe there is already something just like that. And maybe I have to search for this./posts/wikitok-and-the-tiktok-format/Thu, 13 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000/posts/wikitok-and-the-tiktok-format/WikiTok is a project I found via hn . The author mentions that he implemented it based on a X post asking for it. It’s such a simple and cool idea. I love those projects: fast and quite easy to build, they are a super simple showcase and still so many people (myself included) are overengineering things and taking forever to finish or release a first version. HN discussed if it’s even a real tok since it has no content algorithm like the original TikTok. You could definitely enhance this small app. I tried WikiTok once and now I know I’ve got no time to read random (or personalized) wiki articles. A content algorithm wouldn’t change that. But it’s definitely a nice engineering challenge and a cool side project!/posts/why-figmas-slider-implementation-is-amazing/Mon, 23 Sep 2024 06:22:00 +0000/posts/why-figmas-slider-implementation-is-amazing/A bad thing about computer screens? They are limited in size. You’ll notice this, when you build a UI element with a finite amount of possible values. While a slider might be the first approach, it is only useful if the possible values are limited with a upper (max) and lower (min) bound and also in their total number of values. You cant provide a slider with 2000 values, can you? The typical UI element to use is a (web) number input. You can set a min and max value and you can use some logic to map any user input to a valid input. Sounds great? It is! However, it has an important drawback: the missing slider./designs/8-dhl-pickup-for-neighbors/Fri, 13 Sep 2024 06:22:00 +0000/designs/8-dhl-pickup-for-neighbors/Pickup nearby packages for your neighbors. (Post & DHL App)/designs/7-screentime-call-mom-for-more-time/Tue, 10 Sep 2024 06:22:00 +0000/designs/7-screentime-call-mom-for-more-time/Call your mom and convince her that you need more time for an app today. (iOS Screentime)/designs/6-linkedin-hide-shorts/Sat, 07 Sep 2024 06:22:00 +0000/designs/6-linkedin-hide-shorts/Always hide auto-playing video clips (shorts) on LinkedIn./designs/5-hello-fresh-order-a-chef/Sun, 25 Aug 2024 06:22:00 +0000/designs/5-hello-fresh-order-a-chef/Add a chef to your HelloFresh box./designs/3-clear-watch-later-youtube/Wed, 21 Aug 2024 06:22:00 +0000/designs/3-clear-watch-later-youtube/Finish your 'Watch later' playlist before watching anything new. (YouTube)/designs/2-whatsapp-with-llm/Sat, 17 Aug 2024 06:22:00 +0000/designs/2-whatsapp-with-llm/WhatsApp integrating an AI Assistant to help you write messages. (LLM, ChatGPT)/posts/why-is-there-a-delete-button-in-the-update-section/Fri, 16 Aug 2024 12:22:00 +0000/posts/why-is-there-a-delete-button-in-the-update-section/What is the reason for introducing a delete slide option in the update available section in the iOS App Store, Apple? Not only is it confusing, as it’s unclear wheter I can delete the available update or delete the whole app1, but it’s also inconsistent in its implementation: should I wait until an app get’s an update until I can uninstall it? Why would you even think about putting the slide option there? It just reminds me of all the other list item slide options out there that were never discovered by any user./designs/1-downgrade-app/Wed, 14 Aug 2024 06:22:00 +0000/designs/1-downgrade-app/Downgrade apps to the previous version after a poor update. (AppStore)/posts/the-gesture-interface-of-a-popup/Wed, 14 Aug 2024 06:22:00 +0000/posts/the-gesture-interface-of-a-popup/When you open a popup , you want to be able to change the selection without taking your finger off the screen (i.e. just by dragging your finger to the option you want). I recently started tracking my spendings with a budget book app called Splid . This app has not implemented this small, yet important feature. I tried to capture this in this gif. I select an option, swipe my finger up and down and try to select another option. Only when I release my finger can I select the second option./posts/spotify-three-clicks-instead-of-one-the-problem-child-2/Fri, 09 Aug 2024 11:22:00 +0000/posts/spotify-three-clicks-instead-of-one-the-problem-child-2/In my previous post I wrote about Spotify’s bad refresh process on its app’s home tab. In this post it’s about one of Spotify’s most important views, the media player, and the button to add and remove songs1 from the user’s library. Users Complaining and Spotify’s Challenge Users are always complaining about Spotify’s UI changes . I understand both sides:/posts/spotify-the-problem-child-1/Fri, 02 Aug 2024 11:22:00 +0000/posts/spotify-the-problem-child-1/Spotify is on of my most used apps in my daily life. You could call it my daily driver. While the Spotify Desktop experience became mostly stable and decent in recent years the design decisions for the Spotify mobile apps are rather ux disasters. The Problem Below is a typicial Spotify iPhone App startup.. looks all right (besides the long loading time), doesn’t it..?/posts/the-comdirect-app-sign-in-disaster/Sat, 27 Jul 2024 06:10:00 +0000/posts/the-comdirect-app-sign-in-disaster/Where should I look? Where should I click? What are those design artifacts?/posts/10-weeks-w/o-a-smartphone/Wed, 19 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000/posts/10-weeks-w/o-a-smartphone/For the first ten weeks of 2023, I used a Nokia 6300 4G phone instead of a smartphone. At the end of 2022, the thought came to me to start the new year “fresh” and without any distraction. Add to that the founding of 7YO.ME: This doesn’t leave much time for scrolling and procrastinating on the smartphone. Therefore, I made the decision to start 2023 with only a feature phone . The Nokia 6300 4G comes with WhatsApp, Facebook, Google Maps and the Kai App Store Technology Facts T9 feature phone with 4G and KaiOS v2 KaiOS App Store with Facebook and WhatsApp Google Maps (location detection never worked for me), Calendar App, Email App 2 MP camera 2 sim cards and SD card slot about 5 days battery life 55€ The Why I had already used the phone for my “digital detox” in January 2022. The separation from social networks and the feeling of simply being offline is very fulfilling for me.