Dave Crow

“Make me a podcast about training a border collie not to bark at the doorbell”

This was great. Actually gave me some ideas I hadn’t seen or tried before.

How old am I, you ask? Well, web design was in the multimedia department when I was in college.

‎Dumb Phone (dp) ‎Turn your iPhone into a Dumb Phone. Dumb Phone lets you create your very own minimalist-style phone on iOS. Replace colorful app icons, pesky notification badges, and anything that might give you a...

Ever tried the Dumb Phone app? I’ve been using it for the past 6 months or so and don’t have any plans of going back.

apps.apple.com/us/app/dumb-...

NO INDIE MUSIC

Spent some time prototyping with Firebase Studio this morning. There are many things I like about it.

But after a few iterations, it starts introducing regressions in functionality, and I end up going in circles.

Back to Cursor + Claude for now

Cursor enables my minuscule dev skills to actually push code.

Is it perfect? No.
Will I replace our devs soon? lol...no way.

But it allows me to be a better partner to our devs and fix a lot of small things that have a big impact on the product experience.

Now, I can make the change myself in about the time it would have taken to mock it up in Figma and write up the issue for a dev.

I've done a handful of these types of changes so far. (This is the simplest example that was easy to post about.)

I used to batch these types of things into a "polish" or "papercuts" ticket. And then we'd hopefully get to them once per cycle.

I was able to give Cursor the screenshot and ask it where to make the changes. It pointed me to the component's desktop and mobile versions.

I added the text, modified the styling a bit, and pushed the branch up to Github.

No Figma needed.

While I'm very comfortable changing the markup to add the text, navigating the codebase to make the change myself would have been a bit out of my comfort zone in the past.

This is a React app, not just a simple static site codebase. So it's above my minimal dev experience.

We needed to add some descriptive text to this dialog. It's a simple change but one that is often difficult to prioritize because it doesn't seem worth distracting developers from larger tasks.

Cursor enables me to hop into the codebase and make small changes like this. #designsky

YouTube video by Apple TV Severance — Music To Refine To feat. ODESZA | Apple TV+

Current work soundtrack
music.youtube.com/watch?v=JRnD...

Vibe editing

Reminder: Thursday, the 13th is a day. #AppleIntelligence

This is the first real site I’ve built with @framer.com

Took the “skip Figma entirely” approach and it worked very well.

Love how easy it was to rebuild pieces of UI to have perfectly crisp screenshots.

Athletify Modern staff scheduling for parks and rec departments

Been quite a while since I got to build a marketing page. But startup life means that I’m the product and marketing department.

Kinda fun to do something outside my usual type of work…

#designsky

www.athletify.com

Agreed.

I’ve moved a lot of my early explorations to AI tools.

And I’ve been using Cursor for larger, highly interactive prototypes.

Still use Figma for small things and visual polish. But now it more like using Illustrator 😬

So many squabbles in the design industry are people talking past each other.

Companies at different sizes/stages need different approaches and level of process (duh).

Knowing what’s right for the context is the key to making an impact.

#designsky

Cameron has been one of my favorite writers on design for 20+ years. And this one is an instant classic.

It’ll be required reading when I start building a team.

#designsky

If the world is ending, I wanna be the last to know

A screenshot of an email from LiveJournal celebrating that the blog is 21 years old now

My LiveJournal can legally drink now

a man with his hands folded and the words oh my god yes behind him ALT: a man with his hands folded and the words oh my god yes behind him

I’ve wanted markdown in notes FOREVER. Sometimes I forget it doesn’t have it and I type markdown syntax.

Thank you 🙏🏻

I've had many ideas I didn't pursue because the time needed to mock them up with enough fidelity to try them didn't seem worthwhile.

But, with AI tools, the cost of trying an idea drops closer to zero. This allows me to explore more options and pursue more creative solutions.

#designsky

I often have to remind myself that users won't ever see my Figma components in order to stop myself from over-optimizing them. #designsky

That sense of validation when AI likes your idea better than the one it came up with...

Dev: It's gonna be annoying to build it that way. It'd be a lot easier if we can have the user click a button so we know when to load the data.

Me: Well, I'd rather annoy you than every user that has to click that button.

WIP: Drop shift request details

So much data to display. Still refining and looking for ways to eliminate ink on the screen.

#designsky

Ok, I've seen all the happy birthday gifs. Someone please create a bunch of new ones 🙏

Trying to make Safari my default browser. But my company being on Google Workspace might make that unworkable.

I could easily be convinced that Google actively makes their products terrible in Safari.

Late to the party - but I'm coming around to Raycast. Since I moved back to Safari from Arc, Raycast gives me a way to search my tabs. It's slower than Arc was but it works.

Also finding Raycast notes pretty handy.