Design on Flo's Thoughts

The Breathing Light

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 16:56:23 +0100

This was one of the details that made me feel drawn to the platform ever since I first saw it in a 12" PowerBook in the early 2000s. Not only the pulsing, but also the fact that at some point the light disappeared behind the aluminum once it wasn’t needed anymore – only there when it had to indicate something. This was just beautiful.

I had now idea that it also synced between devices:

Whiskey.app

Fri, 03 Jul 2015 20:40:12 +0200

Today I listened to the first episode of the newest podcast in my list, Design Details. The guest, Sam Soffes, builds an app called Whiskey. Whiskey is a Markdown editor, but a remarkable one. Its main feature for me is probably the very minimal UI that doesn’t get in the way. I like this a lot.

It’s still under development and in public beta, but it already is in pretty good shape. It has a preview and an outline mode and allows for plain Markdown or one of those advanced flavors. It misses a few features that I’d like to see in a future version like a command line utility or the option to hide stuff like Jekyll’s front matter. Who knows, maybe that’s something he has on his list.

Pragmatic Podcast

Fri, 03 Jan 2014 23:43:50 +0200

Pragmatic is a weekly discussion show contemplating the practical application of technology. Exploring the real world trade-offs we look at how great ideas are transformed into products and services that can change our lives. Nothing is as simple as it seems.

There’s a fairly new podcast in town: Pragmatic. It’s about tech and design (mostly as in industrial design) in general and is a great addition to all the Apple tech and Cocoa related podcasts I’ve subscribed to. They released six episodes so far, each running about an hour and a half. I listened to the first and the current one and already learned a lot. Looks like a great show!

Displaying a Caller's Region

Thu, 02 Jan 2014 08:00:00 +0200

littlebigdetails.com states the Nexus 4 displays the country a caller comes from.

The iPhone sometimes does this, too. I haven’t figured yet, when it actually does it. Looks like, it works for all US numbers. But why not for German ones? How hard can it be to retrieve a region string for an area code upon an incoming call?