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...
It also means circle in Czech and sounds like crew. When I happened upon the word, I was very proud of myself! I'm usually not great at naming projects.
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)
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.
It seems like the website is region locked?
I haven't seen an 405 error mentioning a specific country yet though, it seemed interesting.
https://imgur.com/a/AiY9xMJ
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.
Quite honestly I particularly don't care if we stick to summer or winter time.
As long as I can wake up consistently at the same time and not have my sleep schedule destroyed for a couple of weeks twice per year. This clock changing business really messes me up and I see no actual benefit of it today.
It's better to have the most sunlight during you waking hours, which tend to be later in the day. People don't wake up at 6am and go to bed at 6pm, more like wake at 7 and go to bed at 11.
Maybe you and your social circle. I get to work at 6:30 AM; despite being fairly far south in the US, I wake up in full night and drive to work in nautical twilight around the winter solstice.
Even in summer, I wake just before the beginning of civil twilight.
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).
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...
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