My idea of a vacation might be weird to some. Sure, I like sunshine, I like beaches – but more than all that, I like making stuff with computers.

So I spent my last trip to the west coast scratching my own itches, writing the little dream features and requests that have been floating around in my head for months.

I didn’t want the stress of shipping anything while on vacation, so after I got back I released one of those features per day. I called it “The Week of Sensory Experiments” because of this cool art,

That week included card resizing, an updated image picker, space embeds, improved card overlaps, and my personal favorite, multi-connect,

multi-connect-small.mp4

People seemed to really like the busy week, I should do this more often…

My biggest source of ideas is people’s problems or requests on the forums, on discord, or IRL. These take the form of either:

  1. “I need X”, which is straight-forward and just a matter of priority
  2. ”I want to do Y”, which doesn’t make sense initially, but finding out the why behind the request leads to something new
  3. ”I wish I could do Z”, sometimes I wish I could do Z too, but I need to swirl the idea around in the back of my brain for a couple months before I figure out how to build it in a way that’s performant and works with the Kinopio interface

dbz-ocean.mp4

Equally important are my own dreams – Kinopio is nowhere near complete in my eyes. Maybe it won’t ever be.

So I continually ask myself:

  1. ”How can spaces be more expressive?”, more personal, and more fun to use. My goal is for the tool to feel like an extension of your mind
  2. ”How can the tool be more usable?”, the more reasons people have to use Kinopio, the more reasons they have to share and invite others to their spaces

I benefit from these in my own spaces. Especially in Life Tasks, where I figure out what I’m doing next, and jot down errands and random ideas and observations,

In 2014, I wrote about my belief that design and engineering are best when tigthly woven together. That’s truer now than ever.

If I’m feeling confident, I’ll jump right into my text editor and write something like this to create a new controls,

button-dialog-example.mp4