Some AI-positive random thoughts with some internal deliberations:

• The other day I posted an image about the underwhelming launch of GPT-5 and it seemed to have had quite the reaction
  • I was half kidding with that image
    • I am impressed by the improvement in error correction and less hallucinations, etc.
  • But it made me realize that true revolution in AI for me was to think about how it’s evolved my thinking as I can now delegate it. Meaning, I can expedite my argument-making in elaborating theses that I use in my mind to make decisions
  • And therefore, the major innovations in AI are not in the model, but in our experience using AI. Get better at articulating your thoughts to your AI and you’ll get better results, and this is the only thing you can truly control. That’s the real skill
• And the beauty of that is recurring automated thinking I do now “what would my AI say in this situation?” which can help me internally predict behavior and make faster decision making
• Even more random is that it’s allowed me to be more higher-level in my thinking than I used to be. Have more perspective in the daily experiences of my life. Precisely because of that “what would my AI say?” question.
• I’m calling it my AI because if you really think about it, everyone gets different AI experiences because everyone asks questions and formulates their thinking differently. That’s really cool! That’s what’s positive about it.
• It is still a bit challenging to preserve spontaneity if you constantly try to automate thoughts without letting them just… be?

TLDR: the more that you use AI, the more that you develop your own way of automated thinking, and the more you’re in control of your actual decisions, assuming your way of thinking is already curious and inquisitive. E.g. you debate and spend time exploring each thought as needed.

Supppp. I’m here vibe coding on a plane as I write this. I’m actually updating yet another blog that will inevitably be neglected. But I love writing so I gotta keep trying to make this a habit lol.

Anyway, I’m hoping to reflect about how I broke the “cycle of presumed importance” when it comes to building things. I’ll explain.

I wrote an article last year about how personal projects can take years to feel legit, referring to the journey of my app Bleep and how long it took for me to feel like I narrowed down what I wanted it to be.

Fast forward to today, it’s been arguably successful in attracting paying customers and active users. I’ve gotten enough validation to know that I should keep going. But the road ahead feels ever so daunting.

The cycle

Let’s focus on the thought of “getting enough validation to know that I should keep going.” For as satisfying as it is, it’s also worth noting that it’s coming after 3-4 years of working on the same project. This “presumed importance” that surely this must be the project is what I’m trying to question at this turning point.

And thus I “broke” this cycle by starting to revisit other ideas I’m still very curious about. I also never got to start over on a new project with everything I even learned about Bleep.

Enter Flow, a “finance” app that has a much narrower scope: manual tracking of accounts, budgets & goals AND…

Me

The simple act of starting a new project immediately forced me to think in terms of what I can bring to the table. If I were to start building a portfolio of apps, what do these apps have in common? What’s my take on digital experiences?

I started this work with such low expectations (in the best possible way) by being clear about making the scope small: just data entry pretty much & only available on iPhone. Compared to Bleep that is cross platform and is kind of an everything app.

This allowed me to use this as an opportunity to build it primarily through LLMS (shout out to Claude Code) and do a lot of manual fine tuning at a record time. I built this app in two weeks to a very endearing amount of polish. Launching it also softly through TestFlight. As opposed to directly to the world in all stores on Bleep without having the opportunity to fix obvious bugs, etc.

Introducing a new app gave me the opportunity to revisit my portfolio/website as well, because I needed to think a bit about what I wanted to offer to the world as a brand of apps, plural.

So what now?

Will I be making more apps? Keep focusing on Flow? What about Bleep?

I actually don’t know. I’m in a priviledged position where I have a better idea of what can work and what steps I could take to get there. Whether that’s on Flow, Bleep, both, or none.

If you care about being a good app developer you keep polishing your work until you can’t no more. I don’t think Bleep is fully there yet. About 60-70% if I’m conservative. But having worked on something else has actually helped in making me renew my momentum when needed. So the story here is not over.

And the same goes for Flow.

New video talking about some cool developments on Bleep and my plans for the next few weeks.

Update 2025-08-04: Not really as back on YouTube as the video was hinting at, but happy to have this on the blog as part of my experience building Bleep. I do still want to make more videos in the future, though.

January. January. January. Always an odd month for me. While most people are working towards their New Year Resolutions, I kinda use it as a “buffering” month. I slow down my productivity and try to not have plans. So…

Games

Finally got to try Balatro over the holidays… Man… I’m in awe that such a polished and well designed game can be made by one person. I won’t lie, I’m inspired but also very jealous of localthunk’s artistic vision.

The real surprise gaming-wise though was Dragonsweeper. I had never played minesweeper seriously before, but as soon as I tried this modern take I was pretty hooked. It’s a very simple game but it blends the idea of exploring a dungeon and using your power of deduction seamlessly, and it’s thoroughly rewarding.

Learning AppKit

Whether I wanted to admit or not, I am still very new to my native development journey. SwiftUI is a great technology for someone who wants to develop universal Apple-platform apps. But it can feel very constraining due to it being very “high level”, considering the reason why I went to native development is to get closer to the metal and to craft the best possible user experience.

As such, I’ve decided to learn AppKit (the more robust way of building macOS apps) not by my favorite method of learning (fuck around and find out) but instead by following good old tutorials by Paul Hudson (our not-so-local native hero.) I found the process rewarding. So rewarding that I went ahead and asked ChatGPT to write me a tutorial to manually code a text editor using TextKit 2 in the style of Paul Hudson. Paul, if you’re reading this, you should make one for realz.

Marketing wins

Okay I lied, I still tried to stay productive by forcing myself to balance between fun exploratory coding and making legitimate progress on Bleep. So my favorite update is the fact that I’ve reached profitability for 2025 in one week! Bleep costs $99 a year to run, and I made $150 in sales (before Apple tax) — how neat is that?

I don’t yet have a consistent marketing strategy, but this particular win came from posting 3 posts on Threads (of all places) with updates on the macOS app with what I consider “flashy” stuff. Good videos recording my favorite interactions and a screenshot of how I use Bleep.

I’m not yet advertising the use cases — I’ve been lucky enough to find that Bleep resonates with other designers and engineers viscerally at the conceptual level, but I do plan to talk a bit more about the “why?” in an upcoming video on my Youtube channel.

✌️

It’s the best kinda game that I can enjoy at the moment. It’s very fast, mentally demanding, and quite creative. It’s also challenging in ways that weren’t obvious to me immediately: it’s intimidating. Both intellectually and socially. Especially socially. That’s because it is intimate. You are doing an activity and only that activity with another person. In silence (usually).

Your mind is also communicating with another mind. You both know the rules and the common tactics. You then improvise and check if your opponent will notice. If they don’t, you feel awesome. If the roles are reversed, you feel shitty.

So the challenge for me was overcoming the mental barrier of not wanting to feel embarrassed and stupid each time I lost or made a mistake. Each chess match can be a bit anxiety inducing.

But the more matches I play, the less impact an individual match has as a whole, and with it the intensity of each blunder. Then I realized (just now, really) that that’s the case for pretty much any situation that forces you to be on display for others to observe, judge and hopefully get inspired by.

The guy from mmm.page just posted an update showing how he just reached 1.0 even though from my perspective he was already launched.

Obviously he’s already gained traction and is validated the concept, probably not long after he started building it (web builders are such an accessible space).

Bleep so far has been a bit stagnant on the marketing department. I’ve kept building and rebuilding the app to its core essentials because I didn’t think the whole concept made sense in its current form…

When I first started building Bleep the idea was to build something that was “personal” and “private”. I got tempted many times to make it a bit more social, but it never felt quite like what I wanted to build.

Yet I think the app I wanted to build unfortunately isn’t as compatible with the platform and tecnologies I was familiar with.

Surely I could’ve built a web-first personal private and encrypted solution with native clients that have syncing support, but it’s not a sustainable thing to build right now. Requires a lot more surface areas (at least 3 codebases vs. 1) for a solo project and it can be expensive to manage.

I… didn’t realize this at first. I also happened to choose a very personal project (I use it every day). I am effectively trying to design what I think is the best app to process new information & build a mental map of memorable things (I will always struggle to describe it lol).

ANYWAY, I spent about 2 years (2021-2023) from conceptualizing to building the app as a web app, and it wasn’t until I started building something on the mobile app that I realize just how fragmented my approach was. And even then I was in denial, thinking I could solo make a cross platform app with web and api syncing all by myself.

Fast forward to almost 3 years (now mid 2024) and I am finally in seemingly the right platform, working more sustainably… BUT I am a total noob now, so I’m slowed down by my inexperience with SwiftUI and its lower level APIs.

I’m functionally where the web Bleep was (pretty much), but there’s quite a long way to go to feel super polished (fluid animations, transitions and performance, platform specific HIG adherence, etc.)

I would love to win an Apple Design Award. 🥇😥

SO, a lot of this is clearly can create pressure and self-doubt (e.g. am I procrastinating, should I have shipped an “MVP” on web before going down this rabbit hole???), but seeing others talk about how long projects can take before they feel like they’re arriving at a certain direction is definitely reassuring.

So far my main struggle was about deciding how to approach a project without it being a tedious chore, or rather, how to stay motivated. Sadly the activities that help me stay motivated (marketing and product design) are also tedious and out of my comfort zone (my designer days are past me 😅), so they take extra muscle to get going.

The one thing that’s true is that I’ve reached a point where things are converging. At the end of 2023 I decided I was going to go full Apple mode with my apps and now I’m about to achieve that goal, with actual apps that feel native and start to feel competitive.

The app is coming together nicely. Definitely rough around the edges, but it gets better from here on out.

Get it👇

• Bleep for iPhone
• Bleep for Mac

If you have it installed in both iPhone and Mac, it should sync your data between devices (and backup on your private iCloud). If that’s not the case, or if you have any other feedback or ideas, shoot me a message using the Feedback option in the app.

Update 2025-08-09: Bleep is fully available now. Go get it!

✌️

Today I launched my new website over at rolando.is. I worked on it for about a week at the end of last year when I was considering freelancing again (decided against it.)

I am no longer looking for side projects but I do want to continue to build over a public space to express myself in whatever form I want, so I decided to tweak some of the animations and get it done in the past week.

The previous one was a bit too text oriented, even though I really enjoyed working on it from a typographic point of view. It reflects a style I very much enjoyed: thick headings in Eurostile-kinda font and bold color throughout with some hairline dividers.

The new one hopefully carries my typographic tradition, but with a little bit more fun on the visual front:

Speaking of typography, the beautiful font that powers the site is called Jugendreisen and is made by my incredibly talented friend Jean Wojciechowski. I mean… look at these alternates:

✌️

Like for most of us, opening my computer or phone is stressful. It means either several messages that need my attention, random promotions from products I forgot existed, or simply social media posts piling up. Yuk.

I decided that my mental health was more important, so I turned the big switch off. I went to my settings and put all my devices in a permanent Do Not Disturb mode. After a month of trying this, I’m not necessarily less anxious or stressed, but…

My digital actions have more purpose

Before the switch, I’d open my phone to check on a conversation to quickly find myself doom scrolling through memes. Or vice versa, really — sometimes our intention is to look at memes.

But now it’s like opening the fridge looking for a snack and seeing the perfect snack rather than dozens of mediocre ones.

Instead of letting my Slack messages come to me, I choose a time of the day where checking Slack makes more sense.

I enter the flow state more easily

I have tried a few apps to block distractions, but nothing comes close to being able to naturally enter flow state (when you have amazing focus on your work or creative endeavor) than simply doing what I feel like doing. No banner on my screen or sound in my head can tell me to stop.

There are other factors, of course, but when you already have many thoughts invading your head at all times, isn’t it better to remove any possibility of becoming infected with more?

I miss some things

• I miss the serendipity of engaging in conversations or social media updates as they happen. But this is also an excuse to carve out specific times to catch up.
• I miss having fewer surprises. It can be a bit jarring to see no notification just to open my work chat and have 10 things I need to look at. 😛

You should give it a shot

While it’s not for everyone, you too can gain a lot more agency by having more control over what gets thrown on your digital face.

If you’re not ready to turn off all your notifications, do yourself a favor and at least try it with the apps you know are controlling you more than you control them. You’ll be surprised by the results. ✌️

Wanting to organize myself and my thoughts goes deeper than just “getting things done”. It’s how I make sense of my life and what makes me feel excited and grateful every day.

In theory, technology should help us get to a point where we truly understand ourselves, and what steps to take to become the people we want to be. But we’ve really only touched the surface. The “productivity” software available today is either too plain and boring, or too complicated to be practical.

Most importantly, productivity software has made us obsessed with being accomplished and knowledgeable, instead of present and observant.

Bleep is an app I built to help me sort through my messy thoughts in a visual way that felt fun and relaxing.

My adventure into changing this reality starts with Bleep, what many people would consider an anti-productivity app. And here’s why I think that’s a good thing:

Ideas come in many shapes

One of the things that I dislike the most about note-taking apps is the required title. I don’t always want to title my notes, but seeing an “Untitled” at the top of the page makes me feel unwelcome.

Also, who says I want to write a note to begin with? Maybe I just learned about a new movie and all I have time for is a link. What should I do? Make a new note just for that link, or do I switch to a completely different app to save that movie?

These sound like small problems, but I see a pattern of friction. Whenever you want to save anything, you shouldn’t have to stop and ask yourself “how?” or “where?”

Chaos is necessary

You should be able to embrace messy, unfiltered thoughts and ideas all in one place, side by side, without needing to worry about where to put things. What most tools get wrong about organization is the idea that you have to create structure from the get-go. Structure comes and goes, but it should never get in the way of expressing your flow of thought.

Structure should be based on aspirations

When we want to group related elements in productivity systems we tend to use terminology like “folders” or “projects”.

A “folder” is derived from file systems on computers which themselves are analogies to real life organization used mainly in the office.

A “project” implies work and a goal in mind — too action oriented. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to get something done, but why does that need to be the default assumption?

I wanted to organize myself as if my mind was a palace. Large, unconstrained. Filled with rooms, each with a purpose designated by me.

These are the actual rooms I have in my Bleep space.

The term “room” is something we can all relate to. It’s based in real life and you can tell how much you care about something by the time you spend inside a room.

Form-factor matters

The way content is presented can often influence how we consume and process it. Can you move items around? Can you see many items at a glance? Is the space you’re on primarily text-based (linear) or an infinite canvas? How you answer these questions will bring about a completely different experience.

For example, note apps tend to focus on one note or page at a time, with very little context of other notes you added. This creates a writing-centric experience, but as I mentioned earlier, not everything is a note or something that needs to be written in depth.

More advanced tools allow you to have different types of content, and even create more intricate layouts. But most of the time you have to build those and think about the structure upfront. And as such they have to be maintained, creating a mental block or extra effort whenever we want to add to them or modify them.

Achieving the right balance between the two ends of the spectrum is an ongoing process. But as a starting point, I decided to go with a more visual route using a square grid: no matter what you add, it will get its dedicated square preview with the same visual prominence so you can see many items at once while being able to rearrange, group, move, or zoom into one of them.

Different experiences for different moments

Like technology itself, apps are often expected to have powerful features that help us reach optimal efficiency. But should that always be the end goal? What if we think of apps as digital experiences, where the focus isn’t on individual features, but on what each experience allows us to do?

Each experience has a purpose. It’s presented so that you act and feel in a certain way. And when you go into each experience depends on what you need at the moment.

For example, here are the current experiences of Bleep:

1. Flow: designed to help you embrace messy thoughts.
2. Rooms: for when you’re in the mood to organize and curate.
3. Map: overview of what’s currently happening in your space.

Some experiences can indeed help you be fast at something. Other can help you slow down and relax.

It’s not really about “productivity” anyway

I mentioned how the current spectrum of “tools for thought” focus on making you feel accomplished and knowledgeable because those are the typical associations we make with “productivity”. We typically use them exclusively for work but rarely to capture random thoughts, moments, or to keep track of places we want to revisit, physically or virtually.

I believe creative thinkers are less interested in building a robust and complex “second brain” when they already have big ideas and priorities in life. We simply don’t want to lose track of what matters to us. We want to make room for it. This should make us feel present, whether that’s on a weekday at work and writing our next big idea, or on the weekend checking out new music. Being present helps us better observe and understand ourselves.

Wrapping up

While I talk about Bleep and I’d love for you to try it, what I hope the most is to inspire you to demand more from the software that you use. Apps, if designed correctly, should make you feel happy, and as comfortable as you feel when you’re at home. And ideally, they should help you understand yourself better and appreciate what you have more.

I am coming out of a creative block after spending a very strange month. Not only have I been out of my comfort zone for most of it, but I also felt the least productive I’ve felt in a while. I felt useless. Not “useless” in a hopeless kind of way, but more in the “what am I supposed to do with my free time?” kind of way. Let me explain.

First of all, I left my job in late March in what I would consider an emotional departure. My teammates and I were close, so I couldn’t be super objective about the best way to say goodbye or how to be useful on my last days. Other than the known meetings and rituals, I blanked for most of it.

After that, I had a couple of weeks of vacation, most of which I spent visiting family I hadn’t seen in years. I blanked for most of it, except I tried to lower my guard a bit. This guard was difficult to piece together but it all put an emphasis on a troublesome truth: I defined myself around productivity. This is a truth that I suspected before and wasn’t ready to confront.

The past few years I’ve inequivocally defined my “happiness” around my career. The problem with this (other than the obvious) is that this narrowed down my world-view. Any excitement or plan for the future was shaped around growing professionally. Everything else was a distraction. This limited my entertainment choices to TV, dinners and video games. Even in the context of having a few weeks off, I still asked myself “okay, but at time during the day can I work on one of my projects?.”

My guard eventually did come down. Not because I wanted to, but because it had to. The unfamiliar places combined with estranged family gave me the sense of adventure that I didn’t know I need. Everything felt alien, but with the right amount of comfort. I had no choice but to go with the flow.

Being relaxed both physically and mentally made me more likely to want to go back to feeling that way. This meant I cared less about the unknown, as I realized I had no control over it. And the more that I realized the unknown had no power over me, the more I started to seek it.

How do you know what you want to do with your life? Can it really just be one thing? Chances are you have many interests between topics, skills, or activities. You wish you had all the time in the world to engage in all of them, and yet, you hope that eventually this will show you a “passion”.

When I was in my early teens I drew pirate ships or cars every day after school, I also made incomplete board game concepts that helped me understand the process of making more complex products. I then played with animation. First with stop-motion using play doh and later digital 2d in Flash. This digital turning point allowed me to play with the scripting language in Flash, or create websites. I later tried Dreamweaver, which exposed me to a more utilitarian way of creating visual and interactive experiences. Turns out this was a skill that was in high demand, so my career in the web was born.

This exploration of different skills and mediums helped me find a profitable profession, but sometimes I feel as though it all happened too fast. As if I didn’t get to “really try” my other interests like I did the web. Am I missing out? Is it too late to change course?

Those two questions, the last one in particular, are a bit absolute. They imply I can’t engage in my other interests without fully committing which is kinda ironic, considering that I got into web development by not fully committing to anything initially. My commitments were to reach a natural stopping point. I didn’t create masterpieces, but I had fun. It could’ve led to nothing and I would’ve still enjoyed them.

The resounding pressure to do something great shows every time I see what others do and wonder if I can bring a unique perspective. But that’s where the difference between trying and really trying is important. Trying means something about the activity or topic caught my attention and my curiosity cannot be silenced. Really trying means I’m ready to take the next step. Whatever that next step means.

A recent idea that I’m just beginning to accept is the fact that it’s okay to make decisions on a “gut feeling” and finding logical reasons for them later. I mean, that’s the definition of intuition.

While it may seem like common sense, it may be a bit more difficult if you’re obsessed with “truth” and you feel like you have to make an informed decision or otherwise you’ll label yourself “impulsive”. I know I do.

I’ve wanted to have a blog since my teens, and I’ve had quite a few iterations. None of which had volume nor consistency. One common pattern, though: I always felt as if they had to have a brand, a theme, or even a subject. I felt as if I needed to pick an audience.

It was honestly exhausting—all I wanted was to express myself publicly. I wanted to write about whatever I wanted, but then “the blog would be too wide, nobody would be able to relate.” If I didn’t brand the blog then it would be named after my name, and my name is not catchy, “who’s going to remember to go to rolandomurillo.com?” However, if I picked a name/logo I was putting too much pressure on myself to produce something worth reading.

Some people write publicly because they are hoping to teach the world something. Or use it for accountability and to force themselves to learn something and share it. Others see it as a viable business. Everyone’s got their logical reason.

I actually don’t know why I want to make a blog. I hope that people find my posts and find them helpful in whatever capacity, yes. But I’m not really at a point where I can deliver predictably to develop an audience.

I decided that’s not going to stop me from wanting to express myself publicly in a written form with some level of consistency. And, in a way, I’m accepting myself by not having a specific blog with a cool name or brand.

My relationship with hand-written notes has been spotty. If I have a notepad next to me, I’m very likely to doodle, take notes and write down my thoughts. If I don’t, I’ll just go back to taking notes wherever makes sense on my computer or phone.

Lately, I’ve been using sharpies and watercolor paper for quick sketches for Bleep and it’s been quite enjoyable: the thick lines of a marker feels faster and less serious than drawing. The frustrating part is that watercolor grade stationary and sharpies are bulky and hard to travel with. Also, making sketches really made me miss the tiny journalist-style Moleskine for regular notes, which would mean carrying a different stationary setup and not being able to combine the two. So I decided to purchase a trendy e-ink tablet that allows you to read, write and sketch on the same device.

The marketing will tell you that it helps you focus and maybe there is some truth to that, but my main reason for wanting an e-ink device (vs. iPad) was that I wanted paper, I didn’t want another screen to look at. The way the light blends into the surface of the device feels the most natural and less intrusive (you know, like a piece of paper) yet I have the advantage of organizing my notes and sketches by project or intent without having to carry multiple notebooks, writing or sketching tools.

It’s certainly a luxury, but I really just love the freedom of having a hybrid analog and digital knowledge base without having to think about it. The last time I had an e-ink device was the two times that I bought a Kindle, read a couple of books and then gifted it to someone. Back then, the technology was good enough for reading but I didn’t see myself writing on them. I am now in awe of being able to have a larger device that looks good, feels good and it’s light as hell.

Ironically, I might still get an iPad at some point but mainly for digital art. Until then, praise e-ink!

In this talk, video game programmer Jonathan Blow speaks of the sometimes unnecessary complexity that comes with writing software. Systems that would initially be well understood (e.g. a single person can read and change them) are now split in different services and abstractions that are harder to inherit and could eventually lose meaning (the collapse of civilization).

I’m a bit more optimistic, but he does give a worrisome example (paraphrasing):

As video game engines such as Unity continue to gain popularity and custom engines become a rarity, will there be anyone who knows how to write them 50 years from now? Will anyone still be around to understand Unity itself?

When it comes to taking advantage of your larger displays, having a tool that helps you split and arrange windows quickly goes a long way. In this guide, I take this concept further by helping you create a workflow where every corner of your screen has a purpose, and apps can be launched and rearranged quickly with keystrokes. All with a dose of beautiful a e s t h e t i c s.

Choosing the right tool

If you don’t have a window management app yet, that’s a good place to start. I will be focusing the guide on Moom but the specific tool doesn’t really matter as long as it supports these killer features:

Grids

Your chosen app should allow you define areas on your screen based on a grid that you can customize to your liking. In my case, I divide my screen in an 8x8 grid for fine-control.

Keyboard shortcuts

Many solutions out there have menus that you can click in order to rearrange windows. This can be convenient at times, but if you’re dealing with large displays, using your mouse for this is going to be time consuming.

Gaps between windows

When running commands to divide or rearrange your windows, you’ll want your window management app to leave some space or gap between them. While it make seem like a subjective aesthetic choice, it will give you some breathing room and better sense of space. Plus it looks good.

Creating a default layout

A default layout is how your windows will be arranged most of the time. You may move them around for certain tasks, but having a layout to default to will keep your workflow consistent. Before we jump to specifics, let’s first answer this question:

What apps do you use the most and what are they used for?

Make sure you group them by category. Order doesn’t matter. This is my answer:

• Internet browsing: Google Chrome
• Main work tool: kitty, a Terminal.app alternative
• Communications: Slack, WhatsApp, Messages
• File management: Finder.app

Designing the layout

This will depend entirely on your personal preference and hardware situation, but what you generally want to do is grab the apps from above and arrange them in such a way that it matches the time you spend on them and the space they actually need.

Another advice is to keep apps in the same category (such as Slack, Messages and WhatsApp) stacked since you can switch between them easily.

Here’s my layout:

I used a 8x8 grid to help create the right proportion. E.g. I needed my browser to be a bit wider than half the screen.

I have two monitors that are the exact same size. I find that my eyes default more to the right monitor so having my work tool (3) occupy the entire screen there is more ergonomic to me. I need my browser (2) conveniently close for reference or previewing changes, but also general browsing so occupying the majority of the left screen feels right also.

Communications apps (1) are stacked up on the same quadrant on the top left of my setup and I switch to them based on need. That leaves a convenient location for file management (4) on the bottom left.

This is a screenshot of how it actually looks:

Click to zoom.

Supercharge with hotkeys

Once you’re satisfied with the layout, it’s time to make it easy to re-create with your window management tool. Moom will let you select a part of your screen and set a keyboard shortcut:

On the top right out of each of these custom settings, I can set a key to use in combination with Moom’s hotkey, which is Control + ↑ in my case. I chose 1 because its the first area from left to right. So, if I want to move Slack or any other communication tool like (Messages) to area 1, I press Control + ↑ + 1.

For area 3, I use Control + ↑ + Space. This is a default hotkey from Moom to occupy the entire screen.

Moom also has a custom setting that saves your window/app arrangement and lets you set up a key for it using the Arrange Windows custom setting:

“Ignore obstructed windows” is checked by default, but I kept it on because I want other communication tools to be moved as well (even if they’re not visible)

In this case, if I want to quickly re-create my entire default layout, all I have to do is press Control + ↑ + D. If something looks off, you can move your windows again (or close apps you don’t want to be affected by this layout) and then click on Update Snapshot to save your changes.

Everyday layouts

Depending on your workflow, you may need to move windows quickly in addition to your default layout.

Side by side layout

Useful when you want to cross reference information or previewing. You probably already use it to some capacity, but here are some hotkeys I use that make that process easier:

• Move a window to the left half of the screen: Control + ↑ + ←
• Move a window to the right half of the screen: Control + ↑ + →

A setting like Moom’s Arrange Windows also comes handy for this, all you have to do is put the two type of windows you want side by side and set it up:

In this case, I do want to Ignore obstructed windows because I only care about the windows visible.

So the keyboard shortcut for this ends up being Control + ↑ + S. If you use a setting like this, you may need to do it per app/window combination.

Zen layout

Even with so much productivity and multi-tasking gains from your default layout, sometimes you just want to focus on one thing at a time. Now, you could take an app fullscreen, but dealing with a big display the contents of that window can look weird or unappealing.

What I call a zen layout is really just a combination of two things:

1. A hotkey to center a window and give it just the right width so the content inside of it doesn’t look weird.
2. Hide everything else with the Mac’s standard shortcut Option + ⌘ + H

In Moom, a setting for my zen layout looks like this:

So now I can trigger this configuration with Control + ↑ + ↵ Enter.

Launch or switching apps with hotkeys

Using ⌘ + Tab should not be your main way to move between apps. The order of the list changes constantly, and you waste time moving around in order to find the app you want.

Instead, give your most accessed apps a hotkey. This way, you’ll know exactly what app is opening and it will become second nature. These are my hotkeys:

1. Communications (Slack): F1
2. Internet browsing (Chrome): F2
3. Main work tool (kitty): F3
4. File management (Finder): F4
5. Communications (Messages): F5
6. Communications (WhatsApp): F6

I use function keys because they’re close to me on the keyboard and the number roughly matches their location on screen, but please choose something that is comfortable and convenient to you, otherwise you won’t stick to it.

To setup these hotkeys, I made an Alfred workflow (below) but you can get similar results with a tool like BetterTouchTool.

Launch or switching to other apps

Use ⌘ + Space and type the first three or four letters of less common apps instead of using ⌘ + Tab. Trust me, it’s faster. Not to mention it’s the same command you can use to open for files or folders; or to perform other quick actions.

Centralizing the Finder window

If you’re like me and have a hotkey to focus on the Finder window and also allocated a dedicated space for it in your default layout, I strongly suggest you make tabs the default behavior for it.

What this means is that whenever you reveal a file or folder on Finder (via Alfred, Spotlight, etc.) they will now open on a new tab on the same window you already have open. You’ll never have to go dig for multiple Finder windows again.

All you have to do is open your Dock settings on System Preferences:

This setting will ensure that whenever you open folders using Alfred, your terminal or code editor it is done in a predictable location

Minimal aesthetics

Make room for beautiful wallpapers by getting rid of noise on your screen.

No desktop icons

Every time you need to grab something from your desktop, it means you have to move windows to the side and waste time looking for where things are. A computer is supposed to help us find things easily. Access your Desktop through your central Finder window instead.

Unfortunately, there isn’t a way to hide your Desktop icons through any settings. So you’ll have to run some commands on your terminal:

defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool false && killall Finder

One-liner to hide icons

defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool true && killall Finder

One-liner to undo this.

No dock

My Dock preferences pane. Notice “Automatically hide and show the Dock”.

Some people like to have the dock to the side (a la Ubuntu). I prefer to not see it. I don’t really need to see what apps are open, I already know.

No menu bar

My General preferences pane. Notice “Automatically hide and show the menu bar”. Similarly, I always know which app I’m on, and I’m aware of most of the keyboard shortcuts I need the majority of the time, so no need to see this information either. The menu bar is always there if I need it by using option+cmd+d or hovering to the top of the desktop.

Wrapping things up

Hopefully these tips make your life a bit easier. A partying piece of advice is to always experiment with new layouts and configurations until you find one that works for you. I used to prefer working on my smaller laptop screen until I took the time to explore my options with larger displays and multiple monitors. Only then did I realize how much more productive I could be.

I’m not trying to imply an authority when I use the word “lesson”. Rather, I speak out of my ignorance and a most recent learning that comes after years of doing the wrong thing when designing new digital products: not talking to people enough.

There are two main reasons why I think this happened to me and probably to you, the reader:

1. Ego. You think you are expected to know the answers to everything because you’ve taught yourself to be independent and self-sufficient, and you want to impress your coworkers by getting things done with intuitive thinking.

   Intuitive thinking is incredibly valuable, of course. But even the most perceptive mind needs to be calibrated. Constantly calibrated. The only way to accomplish this is by having discipline in involving others’ points of view throughtout different stages of the project. From a simple “what do you think about this?” to actual difficult questions that other team members are better suited to answer.

2. Process (or lack thereof). I like to describe myself as “pragmatic” and someone who likes getting shit done. But that’s led me to develop the bad habit of a nebulous, vague process. When it works, it works great. Oftentimes, however, it creates mental blocks in which there is no clear answer of what should happen next. The problem I’m trying to solve suddenly feels larger and more complex than it should.

   This is what made me realize that the answer to such situation is as simple as putting a pause to your tangible work and psychonanalyze yourself a little: what’s blocking you? what questions you aren’t asking? Go back to the basics. Funny enough, this often results in talking to people more.

In less than three years, my open source project Salvattore is helping more than 2K web designers and developers create multi-column layouts like Pinterest. It is not the first tool to accomplish this, nor is really my project. I simply had an idea for an algorithm that I couldn’t code myself (at the time) and I asked for help to my programmer friend Giorgio. I’m glad I did. Not only because I unintentionally learned so much about marketing but also the fact that many websites are using it and we are contributing to the web community.

Without going into much detail, Salvattore’s key difference is the control it gives you with your layout by only modifying the structure of your HTML document, leaving the CSS up to you. The best part of it is that you can configure it in your stylesheets and it plays nicely with media queries.

Getting the project out there is what seemed almost impossible to me considering there is already a very popular solution out there: Masonry.

Before getting its name, Salvattore was known between me and Giorgio as data-columns, since that’s the syntax used in the configuration. It wasn’t a bad name, but I happened to have a spare domain name I wasn’t using: salvattore.com. After renaming, the next step was to choose a good tagline that would make Salvattore easy to “sell”:

A jQuery Masonry alternative with CSS-driven configuration.

Nothing fancy, but it describes the project perfectly and the words used make up good keywords for Google: jQuery, masonry, alternative, CSS. Even though Salvattore isn’t a jQuery plugin, people looking for such would still arrive at the site. And most importantly, people looking for a Masonry alternative. As you can see, Salvattore is the first result!

To get traffic, I posted the link three times in 2013 on Designer News which made it gain some stars on GitHub (about 200). What really made it popular was simply the word of mouth. To that end, I looked at posts on Stack Overflow in which people were having trouble with Masonry and I suggested they tried Salvattore.

After that, recommendations on Twitter, a Tuts+ tutorial and even a video mention from Treehouse helped the word be spread. Knowing that people were using this, I asked them on the site to submit their websites and this is the result (although there are more posted on GitHub):

If I had to recommend anything, it would be to take advantage of the open source nature of your project and let others help you. Giorgio and I were struggling to keep the project up to date and maintaining the repository. Bugs not being fixed, pull requests not being merged, it sucked. That’s why earlier last year I decided to make one of our major contributors, Marius, actual collaborators so that they could have more control of what happens with the source code.

Marius has done a great job keeping up with the issues users were posting, as well as updating the site and the source code. I don’t know how much longer the project will live but it has been one hell of an experience.