Recent content on Alexander Deplov, AI artist, product designer
At the moment, I’m working on my own window manager for FreeBSD, called Asterwm. The goal is to make its UX similar to macOS, so I can switch from Mac to FreeBSD during the day without having to readjust my muscle memory. One of the most important things for me was being able to access both my work and personal files.
This is my FreeBSD music collection. It consists of songs inspired by FreeBSD releases, experiments, and desktop and server experiences that have become part of everyday life. It was built using Suno AI and then tweaked and polished each one. “FreeBSD From 14 to 15” Song Context: I recently upgraded my server from FreeBSD 14 to 15.1-RELEASE-p1, which went smoothly. To make the song I…
The FreeBSD and Apple logos are quite similar. Both have a heavy base and leaves / tails on top. This is how Apple fits its logo into a circle
I turned a Panasonic KX-T2315 desk phone into a physical menu for my FreeBSD server. When I pick up the handset, the phone adapter calls Asterisk, waits for one digit, and triggers a predefined script on the FreeBSD server. This post covers the phone restoration, HT801 setup, Asterisk configuration, Lua dialplan, Python AGI dispatcher, and the full config download. The basic flow looks like this:…
Before the advent of smartphones, constant connectivity simply did not exist. The late ’90s and early ’00s had their own rhythm: a slower, more physical and more local one. In this post, I want to document my memories of life before the iPhone changed everything, so that these moments are not forgotten. Even if the post is a bit chaotic. Late 90s to early 2000s Communication The…
On FreeBSD, YouTube seeking feels instant: click anywhere on the seek bar and playback resumes immediately. On macOS, Firefox gave me a short pause after each seek. The fix that worked for me was not global macOS TCP tuning. Those system-wide tweaks can affect other apps. The stable solution was Firefox-only: keep HTTP/3/QUIC enabled, give Firefox a much larger media cache, reduce media…
macOS has a long-standing bug that persists in macOS Tahoe. When I connect my MacBook to an external dongle with an Ethernet internet connection, it prioritizes the Wi-Fi connection. My Wi-Fi is very unstable, so even when connected to Ethernet, macOS refuses to use it. I set the Service Order to put Ethernet on top, but macOS ignores it. It’s so annoying that I ended up making a script to…
I stopped using dark mode on my macOS. I don’t need it anymore. It actually creates more problems than it solves. The original idea was good: with dark mode in the operating system, you can use your computer at night without damaging your eyes with high brightness. Dark mode was first introduced in macOS Mojave in 2018. Then web community realized the same need. In 2019, the CSS Working…
My grandpa passed away many years ago, but I remember spending time with him fixing a broken chair. The chair was 80 years old and had been gifted to my mom by her grandpa, so we wanted to save and restore it. While discussing how to fix the chair, I asked my grandpa, “Hey, what if we add a screw here at this angle?” His answer was: “What do you mean?”
Font rendering settings Keyboard and mouse settings Interface settings Turn on TearFree Wallpapers macOS theme for Mate Spotlight replacement As I mentioned earlier, I noticed similarities between FreeBSD and macOS—after 20 years of using macOS, returning to FreeBSD feels like coming home. But I don’t like the font rendering used in non-macOS systems. Partly because Apple did it very well — Steve…
After installing FreeBSD 14.2 fresh on my Beelink SER5 5560U, I installed the GPU driver and enabled the TearFree option for better desktop usage by following these steps: 1. Speed Up Keyboard Repeat Rate # kbdcontrol -r fast Edit /etc/rc.conf : keyrate = 'fast' 2. Install Xorg # pkg install -y xorg 3. Add User to Necessary Groups # pw groupmod video -m username # pw groupmod wheel -m username…
As a designer I’ve been using macOS since 2005, but with each new update, I dislike the direction Apple is heading in. They add unnecessary features that use system resources and can’t be disabled. My seven-year-old MacBook Pro with an Intel processor became so slow and unresponsive with the latest macOS version that I can’t use it at all anymore. If your Mac can’t handle…
If you need to create an iOS app icon design or a mockup with various app icon size and want to ensure the corner radius is accurate, use this simple formula: corner radius = icon width × 2 / 9 For example, for a 1024x1024 px icon (the standard size for iOS app icons), the corner radius would be approximately 229 px.
In the 90s, before even the Internet existed in our area, I was lucky to be part of Fidonet. It was an amazing experience, that’s hard to explain today. Connecting with people across the globe through a network felt like stepping into the future, sharing messages (and sometimes files) at a time when such communication was rare and magical in its own way. All the memories about Fidonet are…
I’ve always believed that computers should handle repetitive tasks better than humans. It frustrates me when something can’t be automated the way I want or when simple actions require more effort than they should. Let’s say we want to convert a video from one format to another . This often happens to me when I need to share a screencast video with colleagues on Slack. By default,…
TL;DR I put my €1800 MacBook Pro M1 Pro head-to-head with a €300 mini PC and found the cheaper option surprisingly fast. While the mini PC couldn’t completely replace my Mac for work due to some software and hardware limitations, it made me question the need for expensive purchases. Do we really need the latest and greatest hardware to be productive? Or are we being pushed to constantly…
I have always been a HUGE Apple Watch fan. I used this device day and night, but at some point, after couple of years usage, I realized that I don’t like it anymore. The biggest issue was that the battery drained too fast, so I had to charge it three times a day. I should add that I was wearing it at night to see the time if I woke up in the middle of the night.
Text version Inspired by the Product Psychology Masterclass , I did an analysis of the Opera browser onboarding to find the peaks and valleys in the journey. Each step will increase or decrease the psych level marked with 🟢 for up or 🔻 for down. The Opera website has a nice claim about browser features. Faster, safer and smarter than standard browsers. I was excited to try something new, so my…
Inspired by that tweet, instead of saying “Here’s what our product can do” you can shift to “Here’s what you can do with our product”. This approach led me to rethink all the screenshots I’ve created in the past to make them more effective. I realized I made another mistake by not considering that users often lack context. Here is a bad example:
Throughout my career, I have created several iOS app icons. The biggest challenge is to express the idea of the app through simple graphics. At the same time, the icon should be unique and attractive. Some of the icons have been A/B tested to find the best performing versions. iOS App Icons I Made macOS App Icons I Made Many of them can be found in Michael Flarup’s The iOS App Icon Book as…
With the latest release of iOS 18, Apple continues to emphasize design harmony throughout the operating system with Dark Mode for app icons. It provides a sleek and modern aesthetic that many users have come to love. Unfortunately, if your app doesn’t conform to this visual paradigm, users are more likely to remove it from the Home Screen to get rid of an app icon that doesn’t fit.
Once I was reading a tutorial about color and the article was about “there are a bunch of color schemes, like monochromatic, analogous, complementary, etc.”, with all the description how to create each one. But at the end they wrote “Use them!” This confuses me. How is the reader supposed to learn how to use them? In my opinion, we need to understand the underlying purpose…
Knowing your target audience is critical to creating a product that truly resonates with your users. By understanding their age (as an example), you can tailor the user experience, features, and even your marketing messages to their specific needs and preferences. This personalization not only increases engagement, but also contributes to the overall success of your product. As a product designer,…
As a product designer with a passion for innovation, I embarked on a journey to create my own product. This led to the birth of the Anchor Pointer GPS Compass , an iOS app designed to provide reliable navigation without an internet connection. Total downloads 732K, latest 5 years: Project goal In 2013 I decided to release my first iOS app. On this way I asked my brother-developer to help me with…
The Problem You have a paid iOS app that you want to publish to the App Store, or it’s already published, but sales are dropping to zero. Today in the App Store have about 4 million and 1 million of games according to statista. With such huge competition each new app will be hidden to a user, and according to PhoneArena: 400,000 apps in the App Store have never been downloaded says report -…
Project goal As a side project I wanted to create a game that could be used to entertain toddlers. I wanted to learn how to code using a simple and fun project. By the way, this is my first project with SpriteKit as a developer, so I wanted to keep the mechanics as simple as possible. Researching target audiences Despite the fact that the game is designed for children under 4 years of age, it was…
Project goal A friend and client of mine — Tinrocket — asked me to create a new Mac app icon for the new Waterlogue Pro app. Back in the day, an iOS version of the icon was used for macOS, but John (the founder of Tinrocket) set the goal to make it more mature and more “pro”.
First computer in our family was bought when I was about 11-13 years old. It was a 486 IBM PC. During that first period I learned a lot about DOS, Win 3.1, OS/2 Warp, all kind of Linuxes and FreeBSD, and so on. Different operating systems were installed, along with games and all kinds of software just out of curiosity.
When working with dark UI and custom colors, you need to think about how the content will appear on the screen, not only from top to bottom, but also from far to near. Every button, every view you have has a different sense of distance to the viewer. Darker, or objects that appear in a shadow or semi-transparent usually feels far away from the viewer. White and contrasted with the background feels…
Lately you may hear a lot of talk about AI going wild and deciding to destroy humans and how dangerous that can be. This is such nonsense, and here is why. First of all, AI must raise a question about humans. Only then should it make a decision to do something with it. From what we currently have, our AI systems have never asked a question. With a current state of technology it just runs a piece…
If you are working on an app interface, you need to know very well how people are using your app. In order to improve usage, you need to find an answer to what exactly is popular amount of users and what isn’t. Sometimes app analytics can be very tricky, depending on the complexity of your app, your level of expertise in data analysis and the variety of techniques that require skills to work well.…
Introduction Sometimes, when you’re building a UI or trying to analyse competitors’ apps, you notice that something is wrong with the UI, but you can’t say for sure what it is. It just looks wrong, or not well aligned, or noisy. If you need to make the UI look clean and professional, you can use Strings Method to clean it up quickly. Let’s take a look at this screen first, it’s clearly noisy and…
Introduction When you create icons for the user interface of an app, you should remember that the icon should be easy to read. The user should grasp the meaning of an icon in a few milliseconds and understand the meaning correctly. Otherwise, it will lead to confusion. A good designer should remember that the meaning of the same icon can be changed by its label. By reading the label, the user…
Introduction One of my favorite product design podcasts is the Quick Coffee. They discussed what makes great product design in the episode “5 principles of product design”. One of the principles was the “3 click rule”. The idea is simple: Keep a goal closer to the user, so they don’t have to do more than three clicks. After research on that topic I found alternative ideas to that.
While researching old operating systems I decided to try an experiment and re-created old UIs with modern components. Here we have File Viewer from NeXTSTEP operating system. NeXTSTEP window, old layout, old UI components: Same layout of the NeXTSTEP, but rebuilt with modern UI components: Here we can quickly notice few problems with old layout :
Apple Watch itself is so beautiful, but also its pairing screen. I feel that this pattern is too complicated to be made by hand, so it seems that it was made by using code. It turns out that Apple made it based on 24 ovals, each representing 24 hours in a day. Each oval is offset from the center. So we can easily recreate it in code.
For many years, I developed only paid iOS apps. I read many online articles suggesting to set the price low, like $0.99 per copy. They said it allows more people to afford it. After some tests, I tried with one of my app pricing less than 0.99 (Tiers A, B), 0.99, 1.99, 2.99, up to 11.99. Then I calculated what price makes more income. The result was that one of my top apps made more money in total…
You probably know that apps can sometimes be harder to use than physical objects. They’re slow, confusing, and require a lot of taps, clicks, and selections. That’s why, for many people, pen and paper still works better than some fancy app on your iPhone. Core of the problem I started digging into the idea of “how can it be so simple, so literally replace pen & paper” and…
Introduction If you’re a designer or developer you probably working with icons a lot. They’re everywhere. The main goal for every icon designer — is to make its shapes so clear, so it can be understandable without labels, without words. Even in foreign cultures. Few years ago there is one popular topic in designers circles “why we should not use floppy disk icons anymore”, remember? The idea is…
The Old Newspaper app released on App Store . Story behind the app I just finished a side project I always wanted to do: turn the iPad into a newspaper. From the first moment I saw the iPad, I saw it as a book replacement. The surface we can fill with dynamic information, but unlike the iPhone, it has the same format as books. Or, yes, a newspaper.